Meet the Man Who Beat 'Pac-Man'

(coin dropping) (Pac-Man video game music playing) - [Voiceover] I'm Billy Mitchell, video game player of the century. I did the world's first perfect score on Pac-Man. 3,333,360. Ooh, it's exhausting to just say it. I began in the competitive world of pinball. It moved to Donkey Kong. But the greatest level of competition at the moment was Pac-Man. (Pac-Man video game sound effects) If I was gonna be the best, if I had to be the best at the game that was everywhere. So in 1999, I sent out a press release. I was as cocky as could be. They said, "There's been ten billion games played, "How are you gonna do it?" I said, "'Cause I'm Billy Mitchell." (upbeat instrumental music) You start off on the first board, but on board 21, that's where it reaches maximum difficulty. You have to navigate all the way to board 255 doing the same repetitive thing. You can't miss a dot, a prize, a blue man. You can't die once. You can't lose focus. You gotta stay with it all the way there. Four-to-five hours. You have to take a corner, down to 160th of a second in order to create perfect timing. And keep your eye right here. Right here. (Pac-Man video game sound effects) You have to do that over 29,000 times without making any mistakes and dying. You play 255 boards. On 256, there's enough memory left in the game for the left half of the board, and not the right half. The right half is filled with computer garble. Anything and everything that is not Pac-Man. Different walls, different dots. That's what a perfect score is. The moment that score went up there, I thought, "Wow, I achieved perfection." You get to the end. There's nothing to do but die. There was nothing saying, "Congratulations.” There was nothing saying, "The End, Game Over.” Nothin'. The designer of Pac-Man, not only did he never think anyone would get to the end, he didn't know where the end was. He didn't know at what point the game would run out of memory. Everything to him is completely baffling. They never saw the split screen until I sent it to them. Masaya Nakamura, who's the Godfather of video games, he crowned me "Video Game Player of the Century" for that and all the previous achievements. It doesn't get any higher than that. (upbeat instrumental music)

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 33,865,545

Rating: 4.717834 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, video game, gaming, pacman, misses pacman, ms. pacman, gamer, billy mitchell, perfect score, Tech & Science, Sports & Action, Biography & Profile, Weird & Fun Knowledge, Donkey Kong, Games, Video Games, Arcade, documentary, 1980s, nostalgia, completionist, Video game, Videogamer

Id: IoVvgSwPDYk

Length: 2min 35sec (155 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/occidental_oriental]

Guys, we have a kill screen coming up!

[u/aglaeasfather]

You get to the end, there is nothing to do but die. There was nothing saying congratulations, there was nothing saying "the end", "game over". Nothing.

That moment when you realize PacMan is no different from real life.

[u/norgas]

Technically it's not that the internal storage give out, the memory usage of Pac-Man does not increase between level. It's an integer overflow that cause the problem. The level counter in Pac-Man is saved in a 8bit unsigned integer, it value is limited to value of 0-255. The first level is number 1 so there is 255 levels. When level 255 is completed, the level counter overflow and became 0. Since a value of 0 was not expected by the programmer, a bunch of part of the game are broken by it.

[u/[deleted]]

Wow, this guy is obviously his biggest fan!

[u/IHaeTypos]

For anyone who can't view the video, Here is an image of what the game looks like after its internal storage runs out

[u/thr33beggars]

I used to play Pac-Man a lot when I was a kid, and I really loved that yellow fucker. One time, my parents took me to Chuck-e-Cheese's for some kid in my neighborhood's birthday party. Instead of playing normal tag, we basically played tag but we were Pac-Man characters. So we would run through the tubes and down the slides and whatnot, with everyone chasing the one Pac-Man person. Well, the only way you could get the ghosts is jumping in the ballpit. When it was my turn, I tried to be funny and eat one of the balls from the ballpit, like Pac-Man does. I ended up biting really hard, and when I pulled away I pulled one of my teeth out. Not a good day.

[u/Dankje]

This whole video feels like a shitty comedy with a character Ben Stiller could play

[u/NUTS_STUCK_TO_LEG]

Billy Mitchell was featured in one of my favorite documentary's of all time, The King of Kong. Fascinating look into the world of arcade gaming

[u/Solkre]

So... is he who Peter Dinklage was supposed to be in Pixels?