Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong Records Reinstated After Multi-Year Dispute With Twin Galaxies

ign.com:

Nearly six years after the dispute first began, Billy Mitchell's record Donkey Kong scores have been officially restored by Twin Galaxies.

In a statement posted on its website, Twin Galaxies announced that all of Mitchell's score have been reinstated on its historical database after first being removed back in 2018. They include the 1,047,200 score shown in the documentary King of Kong; the 1,050,200 run referred to as the Mortgage Brokers score, and the 1,062,800 performance known as the Boomers score.

Mitchell was originally banned from Twin Galaxies after a forum poster presented evidence that he may have been playing on MAME, a well-known arcade emulator, in violation of the site's rules. Mitchell's records were also expunged from the Guiness Book of World Records, but were restored in 2020 after "eyewitness accounts, expert gameplay analysis, and hardware verification."

According to Twin Galaxies, the scores were restored after Dr. Michael Zyda, an engineering expert working on behalf of Mitchell, determined that Mitchell's arcade hardware may have been unmodified after all. In his report, Zyda said the visual anomalies could potentially be attributed to aging hardware components and Mitchell's submitted video tapes being "copies of copies."

"The Nintendo Donkey Kong boards are old and their various electronic parts are aging at different rates. As those components near failure, the potenfial for visual arfifacts increases. This means there is no way to compare different Donkey Kong boards as their component failures most likely are in different parts. This
includes the power supplies that power the Donkey Kong boards," Zyda wrote. As those power supplies age, we have no way of measuring how that aging will impact the Donkey Kong board’s operafions
and visual display. As such, there may not be any way to compare recordings from the same board
done at different fimes. In my opinion component aging could produce the anomalies at issue."

You can read Zyda's full opinion