Billy Mitchell

William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was recognized for numerous records on classic video games before disputes arose over their legitimacy beginning in 2018. Mitchell has also appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming.

In 1982, Mitchell was featured in a photo spread in Life along with other video game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games. In 1999, Mitchell said he was the first person to attain a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the arcade game Pac-Man. A 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, follows his attempts to maintain the highest score on Donkey Kong after being challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe. which is not part of the current scoring records.

Early life and first records Mitchell was born on July 16, 1965, in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

In grade school, Mitchell became an avid pinball player. Around this time, Mitchell established a friendship with Robert Childs, who had a business buying and installing arcade cabinets in places such as laundromats.

Return to gaming

In 2004, Mitchell achieved a Donkey Kong score of 933,900, in front of multiple witnesses at the Midwest Gaming Classic, his new personal best. Mitchell failed to appear at Wiebe's events, saying he had not played games for half a year and needed to retrain and practice for the competition.

During Wiebe's attempts, he achieved a score of more than one million points on an arcade unit at his home, which was recorded on videotape and initially accepted by Twin Galaxies but later retracted, since Wiebe's unit used an unofficial "Double Donkey Board" that had circuitry for both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Later in his attempts, Wiebe again managed a high score in front of multiple witnesses at a New Hampshire Funspot, which Twin Galaxies accepted. Just hours later, Mitchell submitted his own tape to Twin Galaxies which purported to show him achieving a new high score of 1,047,200, which bested Wiebe's score and which Twin Galaxies accepted as the new official world record. Wiebe and others at the New Hampshire location complained to Twin Galaxies, and eventually Mitchell's score was nullified due to the game being on tape rather than witnessed, giving Wiebe the record again. After the film's release, Mitchell said he had not expected to be portrayed as a bad person, and that he had received hate mail and badgering phone calls because of the way the film was edited. In addition to the King of Kong, Mitchell appears in several other documentaries during the 2000s and 2010s, including Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (2007), The King of Arcades (2014), and Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler (2015).

On July 26, 2007, 25 years after Mitchell's first record-setting performance, Mitchell again retook the Donkey Kong record with a score of 1,050,200. This score was known as the "Mortgage Brokers" score, as it was allegedly achieved while Mitchell was attending the annual convention for the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers. On July 24, 2010, Mitchell reclaimed the record with a score of 1,062,800 at the Boomers arcade in Dania, Florida.

Mitchell placed eighth out of eight in the Microsoft Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championships on June 4, 2007. In 2008, he became the first video game player on a Topps Allen & Ginter trading card.

In 2015, Mitchell filed a lawsuit against Cartoon Network, saying that in the series Regular Show, a character named Garrett Bobby Ferguson (GBF) who cheats at video games infringed on his likeness. United States District Court for the District of New Jersey Judge Anne Elise Thompson threw out the lawsuit, saying that "the television character does not match the plaintiff in appearance".

Disputed records In August 2017, Jeremy Young, a moderator of the Donkey Kong Forum, expressed concern related to a video posted online by Childs of Mitchell's score at Boomers. Mitchell had played both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. that day, breaking records for both, but was using the same cabinet for it, with Childs having swapped the circuit board between the runs. The videos did not show the complete record-breaking runs, and Young believed there might have been issues with the board swap. Mitchell and Childs affirmed that some parts of the board-switching were staged, but that that part of the recording was made well after the records had been set on legitimate hardware.

Mitchell defended his scores on the East Side Dave Show shortly after this charge, saying: "I've never even played MAME. I don't have MAME loaded in my home." Mitchell added, "The film footage that he has, that Jeremy has, shows MAME play... I'm not disputing what he says. What I'm disputing is the fact that I want him to have the original tape." Mitchell also suggested that the tape footage Young had may have been fabricated. Young responded, "The amount of foresight, patience, and technical knowledge required would be staggering" to make such tapes. The footage of these two scores showed the game loading in a way that was visually identical to how the game loads when played on MAME. Subsequently, Guinness World Records, which was supplied video game scores from Twin Galaxies, released a statement that it would remove Mitchell's scores: "The Guinness World Records titles relating to Mr. Mitchell's highest scores on Donkey Kong have all been disqualified due to Twin Galaxies being our source of verification for these achievements." The removal also included Mitchell's Pac-Man high score and first recorded perfect game: "Twin Galaxies was the original source of verification for these record titles and in line with their decision to remove all of Mr. Mitchell's records from their system, we have disqualified Mr. Mitchell as the holder of these two records."

Mitchell challenged these removals and threatened to sue both Twin Galaxies and Guinness if they did not restore his records. With the encouragement of his son, Mitchell used Twitch to broadcast scores equal to his past records. The situation between Mitchell and Twin Galaxies also created tension between Mitchell and several of his friends and acquaintances in the video game community. After a judge ruled against Twin Galaxies' attempt to dismiss the case under California's anti-SLAPP laws, Twin Galaxies filed a counterclaim against Mitchell and Walter Day in late 2020, alleging that the two had defrauded Twin Galaxies's current owners by selling the site's assets with the knowledge that the database contained fake scores, thus reducing its reputation and therefore its monetary value. In October 2021, a U.S. appeals court allowed Mitchell's suit against Twin Galaxies to proceed.

In June 2020, Guinness World Records announced that, after review, it could not find conclusive proof that Mitchell had used improper methods to achieve his high scores, and restored both Mitchell's Donkey Kong and Pac-Man records. In 2021 and 2022, Mitchell sent two concerns notices to speedrunner and YouTuber documentarian Karl Jobst, informing him he intended to file defamation lawsuits regarding Jobst using a clip in a video that referred to Mitchell as a cheater, and another covering his cheating allegations. The lawsuits were not filed. Photographs from the 2007 Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers convention, uncovered in January 2023, showed that the Donkey Kong cabinet Mitchell used there appeared to have a modified joystick that may have allowed for eight-way motion rather than that of the standard four-way joystick. This would be in violation of Twin Galaxies' rules against playing on modified hardware. Eight-way joysticks are banned because they potentially give an unfair advantage over the game's original 4-way joystick by making it easier to perform moves in the game.

Mitchell and Twin Galaxies settled their cases in January 2024. The terms were not disclosed. Twin Galaxies re-posted Mitchell's scores the same month, and in a statement recognized that Michael Zyda, a professor from University of Southern California, testified as an expert that it is impossible to tell if Mitchell used improper hardware due to the low quality of the evidence presented. The scores were re-posted to a static "historical database" of scores prior to 2014, when Twin Galaxies changed ownership, but not as part of the current scoring records. Further, Twin Galaxies removed from their forums the original posts that had accused Mitchell of cheating. Site administrators of the Twin Galaxies forums acknowledged Twin Galaxies' take based on the expert testimony, but still maintained that Mitchell remains banned from further Twin Galaxies contests, thanked Jobst and other YouTubers for their work in providing their own evidence, and stated that interested readers should review all of the evidence to come to their own conclusions.

Defamation lawsuits In 2020, Mitchell filed a lawsuit against YouTuber Ben Smith (known online as "Apollo Legend") over videos where Smith claimed Mitchell cheated in light of the high score disputes. The lawsuit was later settled, requiring Smith to remove videos relating to Mitchell and to refrain from discussing him further, and did not include any exchange of money. Smith later died by suicide in December 2020. and wrongly alleged that Smith had paid "a large sum of money" in a settlement to Mitchell. Jobst defended himself and said he "never said Apollo Legend attributed anything to Billy Mitchell" and that although he "...felt it harmed Apollo in multiple ways ... my opinion was those negative impacts wouldn't have helped his decision in the end". The Queensland court issued their verdict on April 1, 2025, awarding Mitchell $350,000 plus $40,000 in interest, also ordering Jobst to pay Mitchell's legal fees. While the judge accepted some of Jobst's counter arguments including that Mitchell had expressed joy when he incorrectly believed that Apollo Legend had died on an earlier occasion, Jobst could not cover the payment and raised $224,000 before filing for bankruptcy, of which it is estimated Mitchell received $150,000 after fees were deducted by the Australian Financial Security Authority. Mitchell's legal fees from suing Jobst were $686,671; he is accordingly estimated to have lost over $500,000 by pursuing the lawsuit.

Jobst filed a defamation suit against Mitchell in the United States in April 2026, rising from claims from Jobst that Mitchell had made knowingly false statements in regards to Jobst's bankruptcy and crowd funding efforts in the wake of the April 2025 Queensland decision.

Personal life Mitchell has three children and lives with his wife in Weston, Florida.

Notable scores Mitchell set high-score records on several games in the 1980s and 1990s. Since his initial high score in Donkey Kong in 1982, and record-breaking attempts between 2004 and 2010, others have matched or surpassed Mitchell's scores.

In 1982, Mitchell set a record on Donkey Kong with 874,300 points. In January 1985, he set a new record score for Ms. Pac-Man of 703,560, which stood until it was surpassed in 2001 by Ayra. He set a record score for Donkey Kong Jr. of 957,300 in 2004. He said he recaptured the world records for both Donkey Kong (1,062,800 points) and Donkey Kong Jr. (1,270,900) on the weekend of July 24, 2010.

In popular culture "High Score", a 2011 episode of Regular Show, features Garrett Bobby Ferguson, a parody of Mitchell.