I first played DK in 2008, shortly after I watched the King of Kong. I downloaded MAME and played roughly 60 games in the next 2 weeks, mainly to see what all the hype was about. My best score was 68K, and I didnt play DK again until Feb of 2013.
In Oct of 2012 or around then, I had seen a couple videos online of mame cab builds that looked really amazing. I started looking into it, deciding I would build one of my own soon. I really liked the hyperspin frontend, and spent over a month dialing in a really nice layout. I started searching craigslist for cheap non working arcade cabs that I could use to convert. Within a few weeks, I had found a non working Ghosts N' Goblins that a guy wanted $200 for. I called him up and offered him $100 cash, and told him I could be there to pick it up tomorrow if he wanted. He accepted my offer and I made the 45 min drive to pick up the machine.
When I arrived I noticed the machine was pulled out to the driveway. I knocked on the door and the guy came out and we spoke about the machine. He told me that before he wheeled it out to the driveway, he plugged it in one last time and the thing worked! He had played 2-3 games before he turned it off and pulled it out to the driveway. He said since I had driven so far he would honor our agreement and give me the machine working for $100. I didnt bring a whole lot more cash with me but I gave the guy an extra $20 and told him to have some beers on me.
I decided to not hack the machine up since it was working. I began playing it a lot and started save stating it on mame. In December, I beat the marathon and tournament records of Ghosts 'n Goblins in the same game with a score of 1,216,400. I looked up twin galaxies, as I was considering taping and submiting a record, but I noticed TG was down and remained down for months. Unsure when TG would come back, I stopped playing GnG and placed that on the back burner.
Around this time I had heard of the new aquisition of TG by Jordan and Richie Knucklez. I stumbled on Richie's youtube channel and saw the Arcade Culture Webisodes. That really pumped me up about CAG. I seen interviews with Mark Robicheck and others guys from Chasing Ghosts and I realized this culture was still going strong. I even saw the video where Joel west was attempting the Frenzy Marathon and Bill Mitchell started the timer, and everyone was hanging out at Richie's.
Then I saw footage of the KO2 on richie's stream. At one point on the stream I heard Hank and Yumi talking about a guy named allen who rages really hard on DK. Yumi was talking about allen smashing something over his head, when he got real pissed ( I later come to find out this is the notorious washing machine lid). So I did some youtube searchs for Allen and DK and finally stumbled apon Allen's rage compilations. I was laughing really hard. I decided to check out his stream, and noticed at the time he was streaming almost every night.
After a week or two of watching Allen's nightly streams, I got back into playing DK. This was in early Febnruary. Within a few weeks my score was over 100k! By March my PB was 206,000. I then put up a 260,000 a few weeks later. In early April I put up 300,300 live on twitch. Around 3 weeks later I achieved 409,200 live on twitch. A few weeks later on May 21st, I put up my current PB of 428,200 live on twitch.
One of my biggest motivators is the DKF High Score List. When I first joined, my PB was 270,600. And I was 2nd to last on the list. Now up currently in #81 Position up from #96 or so.
There are also a few people I want to thank for their help and encouragement:
Marky_D, Allen, Corey, Ethan, Mitch, JC, Ben, Brian Allen, Eric, Xelnia, Bookootabor, Garbagetruck + anyone else I missed
