This whole thread is TL;DR, so apologies if I cover something that's been mentioned. Second, I'm just getting up, so I'm a little groggy, and cranky, so more apologies if I sound curt or condescending. Now with that out of the way...
George, what media are you talking about? CAGDC? TG? Online gaming news sites? Local news? CNN? BBC? I can totally see this being covered by our little niche sites such as Alpiger's and maybe even Kotaku, but let's be honest here, hardly anyone outside of our ridiculously small gaming circle cares about a score on any of these games. Granted, a 45640749 hour marathon may raise a few eyebrows, but that's due to the fact that one is pushing the physical limits of the human body at that point. It's like climbing a skyscraper with only your thumbs. It's going to get attention because it's pushing the limits of what the body can do. Now if someone else used their entire hands to climb that same skyscraper, yeah it's impressive, but it wouldn't even be a blip on the national media radar because people do that all the time.
And we're talking about MAME here. Now I am in no way trying to discount Dean's score, since 1.2M is REALLY f'n impressive no matter how you slice it, but to some (many?) people, it kind of loses something when it's not on original hardware. If I beat an arcade WR on MAME, I wouldn't expect to be put in the same category as the WR holder on original hardware. It's just not the same. Almost, if not all, DK masters readily admit that playing on MAME is a whole different animal than arcade. A keyboard is just more precise than a 30 year old ghetto joystick. Dean has an advantage over arcade players, plain and simple. It's like carving an ice sculpture with a small chisel versus a chainsaw. Yeah, it's impressive to pull off a beautiful carving, but even more so with the chainsaw due to the inherent lack of fine control that the chisel offers. It's a sad fact, but arcade scores are simply more heralded than MAME scores.
Last (and I could be WAY off here), but Dean never struck me as someone who's in this for fame. He wants the big scores. While it would be nice to see Dean get the recognition he deserves for 1.2M, the reality is that 99.99999999999% of the world's population has no idea how big that score is, and even fewer care. It sucks, but that's how it is. If you play arcade games for fame outside of the few hundred serious, active players in our community, you are playing games for the wrong reason.
Of course this is all my $.02 and IMHO.
Dean, your score is fucking massive. Congratulations. Next stop, 1.3M?
::drops mic::