I wrote an article, uh, about the article:
http://donkeykongblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/shaun-boyd-proves-something-to-verge.html
(Also, while I'm at it, I should mention that I recently created a "Since King of Kong" timeline, if anybody wants to read through it and tell me what to correct, or suggest additional notes: http://donkeykongblog.blogspot.com/p/since-king-of-kong.html)
Hey Chris, I just noticed this post and checked out your "post 2007" timeline. Excellent job on that!
I have not read through the whole thing yet but there were a few details about your description of the earlier years that are lacking and/or inaccurate . . .
First, one minor point -- the article lists my 1.051m point game as my first kill screen, but actually my previous high score game of 1,026,700 was my first kill screen.
More importantly, I think some attention needs to be paid to the "Live Verification Rule" that TG imposed during the 2008 timeframe and how this (mostly negatively) impacted the high score chase during that time. Specifically, probably the top active player (besides Billy and Steve) at that time was Scott Kessler. He had self-reported a score of over 1 Million points and I believe he included some sort of picture of his score with his post -- I believe this occurred on a true DK arcade cabinet but I could be wrong on that point. Unfortunately, because of the "Live Verification Rule", he was NOT recording his games at this time. He explained that he did not want to be put into a situation where he had to decide near the end of a great game whether to kill it off at 999,900 points a screen or two away from the end or to play it out and become "disqualified".
As a parallel timeline of sorts, players "streaming" their games was just at its infancy -- I remember stumbling onto that piece of the community mostly by freak luck sometime in 2008 when pretty much just John Marks, Ben Falls and Ross Benziger were taking turns streaming their games and watching each other play -- perhaps the first real collaborative effort on this game. This was when I was still a 300 - 500k player and Ross was routinely putting up close calls on his Million Point March, which was being documented in a (then) fresh new thread over on the TG forums where some of these guys were posting their point pressing ideas and keeping each other up to speed on their high score progress, which at some point included Kessler. The fact that Kessler was not streaming his games was not unusual as any streaming at all was very uncommon. Most players who were active at that time fully believe Kessler's claims of a 1M+ score which was never submitted due to TG rules.
As Hank started getting more serious scores perhaps a half-year later or so, there was already a lot more talk within the TG forum and within the TG referee staff about reversing the "Live" rule, and I believe that my MAME score that beat Billy's arcade WR was an important step in that direction. When Hank got his million point game live at Richie's arcade and also submitted a taped game to TG of around 1.03 M (I forget the order in which these events happened), TG was pretty much forced to reverse this rule at that point. I believe the fact that Hank did it live at Richie's arcade was important.
The problem is that at least one player, Kessler, had reached TG's arbitrary ceiling and then retired from the game, having nothing more that he could do with the game on the arcade platform that would be allowed by TG -- and who knows how many other up-and-coming players were turned off earlier in their progress by this rule and moved on before reaching their potential.
I'll be sure to check out the rest of your timeline soon, but I think for someone to really understand how things were post-KOK, these details cannot be ignored.
