The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and “International Scoreboard” Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Twin Galaxies announced Tuesday morning that it “shall heretofore reinstate all of Mr. Mitchell’s scores as part of the official historical database on Twin Galaxies’ website.”
The statement comes days after Courthouse News reported that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies had reached a confidential settlement in a defamation case surrounding Mitchell’s 2018 removal from the Twin Galaxies scoreboard.
Mitchell’s scores appear on “The Original TG Historical Database,” a newly created section of the site that serves as a “historical archive of the original score database, copied verbatim from the system obtained during Twin Galaxies’ acquisition in 2014.” That “unmodified, legacy snapshot preserv[es] performances and achievements predating the current TG ownership and modern adjudication protocols,” Twin Galaxies writes. Mitchell’s scores still do not appear on Twin Galaxies’ main page of Donkey Kong scores, which reflect more modern adjudication decisions.
In its statement, Twin Galaxies cites recent testimony from Dr. Michael Zyda, who was presented as an expert at the trial. Zayda’s testimony concluded that Mitchell’s submitted gameplay “could in fact depict play on original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to degradation of components.”
That finding runs counter to those of the score-chasing community Donkey Kong Forum, which removed Mitchell’s scores in 2018 after discovering what it said were telltale signs of emulator use in the video of some of Mitchell’s high score performances. Twin Galaxies relied heavily on that evidence in its 2018 investigation, which found that three of Mitchell’s high-scoring Donkey Kong performances between 2007 and 2010 were not “from an unmodified original DK arcade PCB [printed circuit board] as per the competitive rules.”
Twin Galaxies has reinstated all of my world records from my videogame career. Here’s my statement: pic.twitter.com/VJUDmubll5
— Billy Mitchell (@BillyPacman) January 16, 2024
“I am relieved and satisfied to reach this resolution after an almost six-year ordeal and look forward to pursuing my unfinished business elsewhere,” Mitchell wrote in a statement on social media. “Never Surrender.”
As part of Mitchell’s reinstatement to the scoreboard, Twin Galaxies said it has removed an extensive forum thread outlining the dispute over his record submissions, “as well as all related statements and articles.” That dispute thread, as well as Twin Galaxies’ original statement removing Mitchell’s scores, remain preserved on the Internet Archive.
Legal troubles
The settlement of Mitchell’s defamation case against Twin Galaxies comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell’s witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had “debased myself before this Court” and “allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement” by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.
But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell’s side to task for “what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence.” The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended “to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court,” he wrote.
Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a Donkey Kong machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.
In a filing last month, Tashroudian asked the court to sanction Mitchell for numerous alleged lies and fabrications during the evidence-discovery process. Those alleged lies encompass subjects including an alleged $33,000 payment associated with the sale of Twin Galaxies; the technical cabinet testing of Carlos Pineiro; the setup of a recording device for one of Mitchell’s high-score performances; a supposed “Player of the Century” plaque Mitchell says he had received from Namco; and a technical analysis that showed, according to Tashroudian, “that the videotaped recordings of his score in questions could not have come from original unmodified Donkey Kong hardware.”
Tashroudian asked the court to impose sanctions on Mitchell—up to and including dismissing the case—for these and other “deliberate and egregious [examples of] discovery abuse throughout the course of this litigation by lying at deposition and by engaging in the spoliation of evidence with the intent to defraud the Court.” A hearing on both Mitchell and Tashroudian’s alleged actions was scheduled for later this week; Tashroudian could still face referral to the State Bar for his misconduct.
“Plaintiff wants nothing more than for me to be kicked off of this case,” Tashroudian continued in his apology statement. “I know this will not stop. I am now [Mitchell’s] and his counsel’s target. The facts support [Twin Galaxies’] defense and now [Mitchell] realizes that. He also realizes that he has dug himself into a hole by lying in discovery. I do not say that lightly.”
Mitchell, Tashroudian, and representatives for Twin Galaxies were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica (Update: Tashroudian later spoke to Ars for this follow up article).
