yaggy
Well-known member
Here's my tale of Twin Galaxies and the world record club. Read at your leisure!
So there's this game I'm pretty good at, have been since it hit the arcades in 1984 and won some local contests on. Atari's Marble Madness. I've since owned the machine, played the hell out of it, sold it, playing it more at a friend's over the years, even tweaked the hell out of mame - which never can compare due to the inability to really get the same exact trackball sensitivity the real arcade game enlists.
In 2004, I came out to Philly Classic, an event held at a King of Prussia (PA) convention center, just to play the games provided by Quarter Arcade and Videotopia. It was packed with people in there, hot and stinky, but definitely a fun time. Turns out Robert Mruczek was there as a Twin Galaxies referee and a couple people came out of the woodwork to try for high scores. A friend encouraged me to play in front of Robert to see how I measure up, not knowing what the "world record" was. I played a warm up game or two and later told him I was gonna now give it my best if he wanted to watch. Good or bad, the game will end in about four minutes, so no big commitment on either side.
I manage to pull off a score of 143,380. I may have died once or twice - which subtracts 1,000pts each at the end, and there is no special bonus for a perfect no-loss game. The game owner gladly showed the settings which were factory/default. Later that day, I managed a 146K score but that's unofficial. My fingers and arms were quite sore later!
Greg Bond had me sign his TG scorebook and chatted for a bit. It was kind of surreal for a minute, I had to be told he held a Mappy record (coincidently, the first coin-op I ever bought for myself back in 1988) and maybe another - make trax? The next day, I went to their website and saw there was a world record of 156,970 achieved back in 1985. Wow, that's impressive. I never believed I was the "best" so it came as no shock. I even tried to think of ways I could shave another 10 seconds off my time or the feasibility of ensuring any and all black marbles were killed (bonus points) or killing the mini-monsters faster during the silly race.
I was second best and that's an achievement in itself, I thought. I mentioned it to a few friends. What a neat thing. Maybe some day I'll have a 156K run myself. I'd play my friend's machine whenever I was there, but that score just seemed slightly out of my reach no matter how hard I tried.
Then, about six months later, a new score pops up. A jaw-dropping 187,880. How in the heck is THAT possible, I thought. There's only so much to the game. The trackballs max out at a certain point, you just can't roll the marble any faster. Terminal velocity or something, but you know - there's a limit. Imagine the fastest lap time on a race track, optimal conditions and whatnot. Then imagine somebody coming by and blowing it WAY out of the water. This guy shaved over 30 seconds off the world's record, and over 40 seconds off my best. How is this possible? I let it get to me, of course, and tried to find out to no avail. The closest I came was a cryptic email that was sent to me in confidence alluding to "other secrets" -- one being some method of attracting the mini-monsters for a quick massacre, but I seriously think this is a red herring meant to explain things away and get me to shut up. Maybe I need to contact Mark Cerny, the original programmer, but that's approaching a high level of obsession.
As time goes on, I try to contact the referees and ask about verification. I am trying not to be bitter, but I wanted to explore the chance that the game settings were not verified at this new attempt. A couple videos had popped up on youtube showing sickening MM performances that don't seem humanly possible -- and in the videos are a split-screen inlay that shows a big picture of the game (a perfect image, either taken directly from the video output of the machine through a converter or video capture of a MAME performance) and a smaller window showing the arcade game control panel and the player's hands rolling the trackball. Knowing what I know about Mame, I realize you can construct an .INP file from hundreds of "save points" you can keep reloading, giving you an incredible edge for building a perfect game play event, even though it's really a playback of an unlimited number of edits to construct a visual delight. In these videos (I have seen two different ones), the camera focused on the control panel never pans up to show the video screen of the machine. If you follow all this, then you know what that means -- this person wasn't actually playing the game being displayed in the larger window.
Anyway, I ask about this stuff and propose that there's a chance, if this record was in fact witnessed, that nobody checked the game settings. If you lower the difficulty level, it adds more time to each race. I laid out a chart of this additional time, which results in bonus points at the game's end (level 6). Curiously, it added up to more than the 30,000 point difference. Well, low and behold nobody has ever responded to any of this. In fact, the scoreboard got split into two camps: rom version 1 and rom version 2-4. All existing scores were left on version 1's board.
The plot thickens even more. Recently, that 187K score had a significant variable change on it recently. It is no longer listed as having taken place in the latter part of 2004, as it had shown for years. Now it claims to be made in 1985, and also more than a month before the long-standing record. I do not have screenshots to show it when it stood at 2004, but I bet Robert or somebody else does. I wouldn't mention this tidbit if it wasn't fact.
So yeah, I know I can beat other high scores on popular titles and that's neat, but I'm not chasing after any world record dreams. Because it is filled with disappointment and a great example of how the system is all messed up and doomed. A lot of those TG scores from the 80s weren't correctly verified, some of them were completely made up but published anyway. I still think there's a lot of incredible players out there and I admire the skills on display. Beating these games is a lot of fun, work and sweat.
Not sure why I haven't shared this story before, but today it felt good to let it out in a public forum for once. I'm not bitter, I'm really not. Just want to warn new challengers about the follies of the high scores club since the general topic comes up a bunch.
MM Scoreboard: http://www.twingalaxies.com/php/scores/SeeScoreDisplay.php?pi=2&gi=7530&vi=3339&s=1
So there's this game I'm pretty good at, have been since it hit the arcades in 1984 and won some local contests on. Atari's Marble Madness. I've since owned the machine, played the hell out of it, sold it, playing it more at a friend's over the years, even tweaked the hell out of mame - which never can compare due to the inability to really get the same exact trackball sensitivity the real arcade game enlists.
In 2004, I came out to Philly Classic, an event held at a King of Prussia (PA) convention center, just to play the games provided by Quarter Arcade and Videotopia. It was packed with people in there, hot and stinky, but definitely a fun time. Turns out Robert Mruczek was there as a Twin Galaxies referee and a couple people came out of the woodwork to try for high scores. A friend encouraged me to play in front of Robert to see how I measure up, not knowing what the "world record" was. I played a warm up game or two and later told him I was gonna now give it my best if he wanted to watch. Good or bad, the game will end in about four minutes, so no big commitment on either side.
I manage to pull off a score of 143,380. I may have died once or twice - which subtracts 1,000pts each at the end, and there is no special bonus for a perfect no-loss game. The game owner gladly showed the settings which were factory/default. Later that day, I managed a 146K score but that's unofficial. My fingers and arms were quite sore later!
Greg Bond had me sign his TG scorebook and chatted for a bit. It was kind of surreal for a minute, I had to be told he held a Mappy record (coincidently, the first coin-op I ever bought for myself back in 1988) and maybe another - make trax? The next day, I went to their website and saw there was a world record of 156,970 achieved back in 1985. Wow, that's impressive. I never believed I was the "best" so it came as no shock. I even tried to think of ways I could shave another 10 seconds off my time or the feasibility of ensuring any and all black marbles were killed (bonus points) or killing the mini-monsters faster during the silly race.
I was second best and that's an achievement in itself, I thought. I mentioned it to a few friends. What a neat thing. Maybe some day I'll have a 156K run myself. I'd play my friend's machine whenever I was there, but that score just seemed slightly out of my reach no matter how hard I tried.
Then, about six months later, a new score pops up. A jaw-dropping 187,880. How in the heck is THAT possible, I thought. There's only so much to the game. The trackballs max out at a certain point, you just can't roll the marble any faster. Terminal velocity or something, but you know - there's a limit. Imagine the fastest lap time on a race track, optimal conditions and whatnot. Then imagine somebody coming by and blowing it WAY out of the water. This guy shaved over 30 seconds off the world's record, and over 40 seconds off my best. How is this possible? I let it get to me, of course, and tried to find out to no avail. The closest I came was a cryptic email that was sent to me in confidence alluding to "other secrets" -- one being some method of attracting the mini-monsters for a quick massacre, but I seriously think this is a red herring meant to explain things away and get me to shut up. Maybe I need to contact Mark Cerny, the original programmer, but that's approaching a high level of obsession.
As time goes on, I try to contact the referees and ask about verification. I am trying not to be bitter, but I wanted to explore the chance that the game settings were not verified at this new attempt. A couple videos had popped up on youtube showing sickening MM performances that don't seem humanly possible -- and in the videos are a split-screen inlay that shows a big picture of the game (a perfect image, either taken directly from the video output of the machine through a converter or video capture of a MAME performance) and a smaller window showing the arcade game control panel and the player's hands rolling the trackball. Knowing what I know about Mame, I realize you can construct an .INP file from hundreds of "save points" you can keep reloading, giving you an incredible edge for building a perfect game play event, even though it's really a playback of an unlimited number of edits to construct a visual delight. In these videos (I have seen two different ones), the camera focused on the control panel never pans up to show the video screen of the machine. If you follow all this, then you know what that means -- this person wasn't actually playing the game being displayed in the larger window.
Anyway, I ask about this stuff and propose that there's a chance, if this record was in fact witnessed, that nobody checked the game settings. If you lower the difficulty level, it adds more time to each race. I laid out a chart of this additional time, which results in bonus points at the game's end (level 6). Curiously, it added up to more than the 30,000 point difference. Well, low and behold nobody has ever responded to any of this. In fact, the scoreboard got split into two camps: rom version 1 and rom version 2-4. All existing scores were left on version 1's board.
The plot thickens even more. Recently, that 187K score had a significant variable change on it recently. It is no longer listed as having taken place in the latter part of 2004, as it had shown for years. Now it claims to be made in 1985, and also more than a month before the long-standing record. I do not have screenshots to show it when it stood at 2004, but I bet Robert or somebody else does. I wouldn't mention this tidbit if it wasn't fact.
So yeah, I know I can beat other high scores on popular titles and that's neat, but I'm not chasing after any world record dreams. Because it is filled with disappointment and a great example of how the system is all messed up and doomed. A lot of those TG scores from the 80s weren't correctly verified, some of them were completely made up but published anyway. I still think there's a lot of incredible players out there and I admire the skills on display. Beating these games is a lot of fun, work and sweat.
Not sure why I haven't shared this story before, but today it felt good to let it out in a public forum for once. I'm not bitter, I'm really not. Just want to warn new challengers about the follies of the high scores club since the general topic comes up a bunch.
MM Scoreboard: http://www.twingalaxies.com/php/scores/SeeScoreDisplay.php?pi=2&gi=7530&vi=3339&s=1


