100th place is now 361,200!

[homerwannabee]

If you really think about it, that's amazing.  I mean a person has to hit 361,200 just to crack the top 100.  So in my opinion if a person even get's a top 100 score, I think it's a cause for celebration.  Because getting a top 100 score is no easy feat anymore.  It represents a large amount of dedication.

[JNugent]

I'm glad you posted this, George.  It gives some perspective.  My PB is now 255,300... I have a LONG way to go!  Loving DKF...

[marinomitch13]

Yeah, 350k+ is no joke! I remember thinking I was like 23rd in the world with a score of 370k (based upon the TG scoreboard) just a few years ago. If 100 people end up KSing the game, like that one thread was speculating, that would mean top 100 places would be like 800k+! That would be pretty daunting, but I think it will eventually be the case.

[Shane_NC]

Yea I definetely agree. At 350K you must have a decent knowledge of spring retreat strategy to get there. Definetely takes a lot of practice and hard work. I could only get to 250K without a sound retreat strategy.

[JNugent]

My PB is now 300,800.  I have to agree with Shane.  I've been working on a sound retreat strategy, as well as a few other things, and I think that has been instrumental in getting into the 300k range.  I still have a long way to go...

[LMDAVE]

I hate saying "what if" or using fantasy thoughts, but what if every arcade Donkey Kong game played since 1981 was miracoulously logged and documented, what do you think the top 1000 would look like?

I bring this up because I can remember back in the day walking into the arcade on Donkey Kong and seeing a 500K score on the board,  and I would just have to think that person is probably not in our circle of DK now.

My answer to my own question is I think there would be 100's in the 300-500K range, 600-700K (hard to tell), but I think our list is probably pretty accurate from upper 800K on, as for history and true world rankings.

How many Steve Wiebe's were out there? Or people who may have killscreened and just moved on with life and didn't even hear about KoK, etc...Not too many I can imagine.

[ChrisP]

if every arcade Donkey Kong game played since 1981 was miraculously logged and documented, what do you think the top 1000 would look like?

My answer to my own question is I think there would be 100's in the 300-500K range, 600-700K (hard to tell), but I think our list is probably pretty accurate from upper 800K on, as for history and true world rankings.

Agree totally, Dave.

One of the reasons is the psychology of it.

Imagine playing DK and not even knowing about the kill screen (which would describe the vast majority of arcade-goers in the 80s). Without that particular goalpost in sight, nobody would have much of an incentive to push for L22 the way we do now. Anybody who could get 300-500K, thus looping the game more than a dozen times, would probably feel that they were "done" with the game, that they were as good as they ever needed to be.

The idea of rolling the score might have been enticing, but most probably concluded that it just wasn't worth the massive effort it would have taken.

Honestly, how interesting would this game be if there was no community around it, no leaderboard to gun for?

We go for a kill screen because we know that there IS one. We point-press because we're pushing each other to, and there's a spot on the board to be won.

In fact, that's what I find so interesting and impressive about Steve Wiebe's play in the late 80s. He was just mastering the game purely for its own sake (and with zero help), hitting the kill screen by accident. Same feat as the other 50-odd people who have done it since, but a completely different psychological/motivational context.

[lakeman421]

I cant imagine hitting the kill screen with no knowledge of one.  I probably would have thought the game broke and I would start yelling in French.

[hchien]

Are we talking top 1000 players or top 1000 scores?

I wouldn't be surprised if we were missing 100's of 500K players.  In fact, I'm pretty sure we are.   Remember there were probably millions of people playing it bitd and 1000's playing it today.  Case in point, there's a guy at Barcade who has gotten in the 500K's many times who is unknown to us (goes by the initials IVY).  I haven't met the guy, but as a joke I got the top score, 5xxK, and put GIV's initials up.  He subsequently beat it and I left it alone (I'm not that mean!).

As for 800K+ scores, I bet we are missing a few but not many.  When I met Daniel Dock at Funspot about a year ago (at that point in time I don't think he was known to any of us), I thought he was just some "random" player.  We started chatting and when I found out his high score was 700K+, I was impressed. 

It's easy to think we are the only ones playing it, but in fact there are many outsiders unknown to us.  I occasionally hear from outsiders via facebook/email/twitter/etc and invite them to join us, but we are an intimidating group of jocks.

[TheSunshineFund]

Fwiw my brother and I both got 500k in the same 2p game in the early 90s at the mall arcade which still had a dk and pacman in it.  He hadn't played dk in 20 years and got 250k on my machine.  We played a lot of dk in the 80s as it was the only classic game left in our arcade during the fighter era....there were plenty of good dk players that played for fun like we did back then and push each other to improve.  Mostly just to see "what came next" in the game. 

[ChrisP]

I agree that one would want to play as long as they could on one quarter. So yes, I suppose that is true, one wouldn't necessarily need to know about the kill screen to keep pushing, especially the competitive types.

But not everybody is the same, and I do think there is another type of player who would say "meh, good enough" around 300-400K if he didn't know that there was an endpoint. I came very, very close to saying that myself actually, even knowing about the endpoint. I thought "333K is all I need." (Of course then I had a total freak 600K game and the rest is history...)

However, I also agree with what Hank is implying (though he didn't say it directly): there's a significant difference in ability between 500K and 800K+, even running through with the safest of safe tactics.

Hundreds of 500K players missing? I could see that.

Not many 800K+ though, and Billy's 874K record is the best evidence.

I just don't think that record would have held for almost twenty years, including among the diehard competitive CAG world, if it was a score that more than a handful of players "in the wild" had approached, at least before MAME/the movie, etc. came along and greatly amplified motivation/interest in DK.

Million points though? I am VERY confident that our list correlates almost exactly with reality!

[LMDAVE]

Are we talking top 1000 players or top 1000 scores?

Players.....I, myself, probably have about 40-50 500K games under my belt, so I was referring to players' PB's

Imagine playing DK and not even knowing about the kill screen (which would describe the vast majority of arcade-goers in the 80s). Without that particular goalpost in sight, nobody would have much of an incentive to push for L22 the way we do now. Anybody who could get 300-500K, thus looping the game more than a dozen times, would probably feel that they were "done" with the game, that they were as good as they ever needed to be.

I do agree with that. Back in the day, PAC MAN was my game, and I had a PB in the upper 800k's, never would I have tried to play to 3.3M, but maybe to roll the score, I thought about that, but that was it. Mainly because I didn't know of any true score keeping site or the world record. So, if I would have rolled pac man I probably will have lost interest in the game and let it die.

[mikegmi2]

Another related topic that I think has been touched on before is, how many people are maybe out there that have the potential to reach 500k, 800k, or 1M, that have never played DK before.

I sometimes think about pro athelets...baseball, basketball players (same thing, we are all jocks)...and wonder if maybe there is someone out there that could have taken Michael Jordan's place if they applied themselves and really put in the effort.  Or matched his accomplishments.  I'd find it fairly hard to believe.  Mostly all kids play sports when they are young, and you'd think that most of the best of the best eventually go on to play at a collegate level, and maybe make it to the pros.  The top are at the top...and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else in the world that could take their spots.

What about DK though?

[ChrisP]

I've thought about that a lot, and I've always found the question really interesting.

It seems to me that the raw material to master DK (at least to the point of getting a kill screen, or even a million) doesn't seem to be particularly rare. Not, at any rate, anywhere in the same ballpark of rare as Michael Jordan-like talent.

My evidence is that a very large percentage of people who set out with the serious intention of achieving a kill and/or a million at DK eventually succeed. Pretty much everybody who has ever wanted it, got it. I've heard it said, and it's being said more and more often lately, "any idiot can get a kill screen."

I wouldn't put it that way, but I do have to disagree with Walter in KoK when he says that playing at a high level takes "deep, comprehensive intelligence" or even "hardcore skill" as Billy says.

It really just takes "hardcore interest," and a very narrow band of the intelligence spectrum.

In fact, I can really only think of one player who has put a lot of effort into DK that (I'm sadly starting to believe) may genuinely not have the capacity to killscreen it.

This world of ours is super-tiny potatoes. And even within our tiny world we have over 50 kill screeners and are about to crack 20 million-pointers. It's not like basketball or baseball where there are literally tens of thousands of people striving to get into the NBA/MLB-type upper echelons.

There's definitely a "self-selection bias" here that taints all of this analysis (most people who take up the game seriously only do so because they already have an affinity for it), but rest assured, if an internationally-publicized $20,000 bounty for every first-time killscreener had been put up 5 years ago, we'd have thousands of killscreeners by now.

Even if that bounty were on 1.2 million, it would have been claimed, many times over by supergeniuses who the DK world never would have known otherwise. Incentivize something with cash and you'll find out pretty quick how rare the talent needed to do it really is.

[homerwannabee]

Actually I believe that most of the people on this forum are extremely intelligent, or at least they are extremely intelligent in regards to video game I.Q..  Just look at the top scores in Donkey Kong, and you will see a couple M.I.T. graduates, and even a boat load of software engineers.

I would say that 8 out of the top 9 are there simply because their mental abilities are much stronger than the rest of the population.   I do believe it's possible to still not be of super high intelligence to be in the top 10, but you really have to work at it in order to do so if you are not.  Not all of us can be Jeff Willms, or Hank Chien.