| treceb |
09-23-2005 12:57 PM |
It took almost twenty years, but on July 3, 1999 for the first time ever, a perfect score of 3,333,360 was achieved on Pac-Man by Billy Mitchell at the Funspot Family Fun Center, Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. To achieve this, Billy had to eat every single bonus prize and every possible blue ghost in all 256 levels of the game - a feat which took him over six hours to complete. Not only that but he didn't lose a single life. It was the first ever perfect game of Pac-Man.
On completing the game, Billy announced "I never have to play that darn game again". He had been playing for seventeen years. In a recent interview with videogames.com, Billy spoke about how he did it.
"I understand the behavior of the ghosts and am able to manipulate the ghosts into any corner of the board I choose. This allows me to clear the screen with no patterns. This was a more difficult method for the initial 18 screens. I chose to do it this way because I wanted to demonstrate the depths of my abilities. I wanted to raise the bar higher - to a level that no one else could match."
Imagine a world in which Billy Mitchell never encountered Pac-Man. Put to good use his sharp mind, excellent hand-eye coordination, incredibly long attention span and his prodigious talent for problem-solving probably would have led the world into a utopian technological society by now. The human genome would have been mapped by the mid eighties. World poverty would have been eliminated entirely. The air and the earth would be clean. We'd be living in an age of unprecedented peace. Serbs and Kosovars would be frolicking hand in hand cracking jokes about their ethnic differences. Billy Mitchell would have a girlfriend. Instead, Billy Mitchell played Pac-Man and grew a moustache.
Billy recently offered a $100,000 prize to anyone able to demonstrate that the split-screen level (level 256) is passable. Many have claimed to have achieved this, but no conclusive proof has ever been produced. In 1982, the then eight-year-old Jeffrey R. Yee received a congratulatory letter from President Reagan for his reported world record of 6,131,940 (a score that is only possible if the split-screen can be solved). The bitterness over this incident evidently continues to this day. |
