The Longest Con In Video Game History

everyone knows todd rogers is a liar and a cheat but i don't think they truly know the full extent of his transgressions his lies were so blatant and easily falsifiable that it is a disgrace that he got the attention he did for years journalists parroted his fabricated stories as truth without the slightest of effort to fact check his claims his ultimate downfall was mathematics and the inescapable conclusion that many of the times he had claimed to have achieved was simply impossible these facts are well known and have been exhaustingly documented but what many don't know is just how corrupt and bold todd really is he lied constantly and confidently about things that take less than five minutes to prove false but no one bothered to double check his claims todd may have been a compulsive liar but when so many people believe extraordinary claims without checking for themselves and then spread these claims they are all complicit today we will delve into the history of todd's most infamous story the oldest world record in video game history his time of 5.51 seconds on activision's dragster through uncovering the truth you will begin to realize just how gullible people really are and we will quell this notion that todd rogers simply lied about a video game score he did much more than that and it was much much worse in 2012 guinness world records officially recognized todd rogers as holding the longest lasting video game record a time of 5.51 on dragster for the atari 2600 now given that a score of 5.51 was later proven to be completely impossible how on earth did this acknowledgement ever happen well let's find out the first step on our journey backwards takes us to twin galaxies twin galaxies is the score keeping organization that guinness relies on for many of its records so in the case of the oldest video game record guinness took the word of twin galaxies who had advised them that the oldest record was todd's 5.51 according to twin galaxies the 5.51 was achieved on the 1st of september 1982. on the now removed guinness world records page it also stated that todd has held the high score record on dragster from the 1st of december 1980. it also gives us the origin of the claim stating that he was officially recognized by activision this recognition from activision was the entire foundation for adding the record to the twin galaxy's database in the past twin galaxies had two main ways to validate scores you either had to perform the score live in front of a twin galaxy's referee or you needed to provide video evidence of the score todd's 5.51 satisfied neither of these requirements and this was a rare instance where twin galaxies relied on the adjudication from a third party to recognize the score this was confirmed by the twin galaxy's founder walter day walter also mentioned that it was based on guinness acceptance as well which is totally bizarre and one of the stupidest causality loops that i've ever heard we will get to this point a bit later in the video so guinness relied on twin galaxies twin galaxies relied on activision but how exactly did twin galaxies get confirmation from activision well the original source was an activision newsletter called activisions that had seven volumes and ran from the fall of 1981 until fall of 1983 within these newsletters is the proof of todd's claims so let's look inside and see what we find volume 1 fall of 1981 the world-class dragster club has 2 900 members and the club has the only record jointly held by a father and son 5.61 seconds okay while this is surprising as guinness said todd had held the record since 1980. let's have a look at volume 2 winter of 1982. here todd does hold the record now at 5.57 along with two other people greg nichols and tony armstrong volume 3 released in the spring of 1982 once again shows that three people hold the dragster record which remains at 5.57 in the fall of 1982 volume 4 was released showing that now four people had tied 5.57 in december of 1982 volume 5 was released it's important to remind you that according to twin galaxies and guinness world records todd achieved the 5.51 on the 1st of september 1982 so we should find his record in this newsletter well it does say that the record for dragster is 5.51 but who holds the record on the next page it lists two people as having the dragster record william stewart and kevin kopichewski todd rogers did not even hold the record as a tie at this point in fact activision would not even credit rogers as even tying 5.51 until spring of 1983 with volume 6 of the activision's newsletter here he is shown as being the third person to have achieved it after the two gentleman who was still credited from the previous volume there was literally no published document from activision that recognized todd rogers as having a 5.51 in 1982. the final volume of the activision's newsletter released in the fall of 1983 did not feature dragster at all in the spring of 1983 there was another mention of the dragster record in activision's fun club news which was another official activision publication in this newsletter it stated that the dragster world record was a 5.1 conveniently despite this coming from the horse's mouth directly it was completely ignored by twin galaxies and everyone else as well so despite todd never having actually been credited as having a 5.51 in 1982 and even though there were two other people that had legitimately proven 5.51 before him and even after activision itself published the world record as being a 5.1 it was todd that ended up on twin galaxies standing alone above the rest with the world record of 5.51 seconds we don't know who entered todd's score into the twin galaxy's database during the dragster dispute on the twin galaxy's forums it did become known that todd had a long history of inputting his own scores so that is definitely a possibility regardless whomever did it did not base it on documents provided from activision there is a word to describe this and it's called corruption so when walter day says this many many years ago when todd brought his score on dragster to us it was not adjudicated by twin galaxies it was a score that had been dealt with by activision and then i remember correctly was uh uh you know accepted by guinness so when todd came forward he didn't play first we didn't adjudicate his score we accepted the activision uh confirmation the activision adjudication and the guinness acceptance so that was the basis for being recognized by twin galaxies he's lying when todd says this so over the period of 1980 uh to 1982 i whittled my time down on the dragster score and there were other people that had tied me but never once beat the score before i was in second place i would make a score they would tie me i would break my world record they would tie me i'd break my world record and so on until about the early part of 1982 march or april i submitted a the original first 5.51 polaroid to activision he's lying they didn't just lie about the chronology of the activision recognition either they also fabricated a story about rogers being recognized by guinness in the 80s in an interview in 2013 rogers stated it wasn't until 1982 at the consumer electronics show that guinness officially recognized my record which was later published in the 1986 guinness book of world records before we fact check this claim it's worth noting that todd's story of how guinness came to know of the dragster record has changed several times in this article he said it happened at the consumer electronics show but in other interviews he has stated that activision sent a polaroid to guinness and other times he has stated that he doesn't even know how guinness came to know of the record in the first place in any case the great thing about books is the fact that we can read them so when someone makes a claim that they were published in a book it's theoretically possible to check to see if it's true unfortunately this does take a couple of minutes of research which is something that journalists these days don't seem very interested in doing todd claims that he was in the 1986 guinness book of world records spoiler alert he isn't not only that but the book says something very interesting about the nature of scores it recognized at that time in the book guinness stated highest score records are meaningless because of the tremendous variance between the games and cassettes available for play at home and in arcades each machine each joystick setting each environment is different so that skill and endurance cannot be measured and compared with precision therefore the only records worth publishing are those of contest winners to ascertain what scores in video games are actually world records competitions have been held under the auspices of twin galaxies with walter day as coordinator in order to verify video game scores guinness relied entirely on twin galaxies the only records that were recognized by twin galaxies were those that were set in a live competition setting guinness would continue posting these video game world records for a couple more years in the 80s before interest dried up and they were excluded entirely until many years later suffice to say rogers was never featured or mentioned in a single one of these books a quick recap before we go deeper guinness accepted the record because of twin galaxies twin galaxies accepted the record because of activision and guinness which creates a causality loop that may destroy the entire universe activision recognized two other people as having set the record of 5.51 first and would later state that the world record was 5.1 man vs computer todd's most intricate fable the legend goes that david crane the creator of dragster programmed a computer to run a perfect dragster race the perfect dragster race resulted in a time of 5.4 seconds which was astonishing given that todd had beaten this time the way todd tells this story has changed and evolved slightly over the years but the earliest instance i found was back in 2001. rogers recalled activision thought this score was impossible what i didn't know was they had a computer simulated perfect run the computer's run was of a 5.54 and activision wanted to know how i could do better i told them how i engaged the clutch until 0 and then popped the clutch already in second gear that explained the mystery and activision sent todd a certificate with his high score on it congratulating him on his new record the timeline of this story is important as todd claims that all of this happened in 1982 in fact early 1982 as we already know from activision's newsletters though this isn't true at all the specific story of todd submitting the 5.51 and activision's response to it slowly started to become more fleshed out over the years in 2005 he provided more details he told him a phone call from jan marcella who wanted to know how he shifted his dragster jan marcella was the customer relations representative at activision obviously if anyone knew of the various advanced drags to shifting techniques it would be her todd proclaimed to this very day i am the only person officially to have beaten activision's perfect run something must have happened throughout the years perhaps people started digging into the activision archives and were discovering that todd really wasn't the only or even the first person to achieve a 5.51 it must have come up at some point because todd would eventually change his story to include the other two record holders one day jan marcela called me up and said hey i want to know how you shift and when i explained when i explained to her um how i shifted i engaged the clutch on the countdown rev the engine to give my drugstore fuel and then pop the clutch at you know the at this before before the zero to get some additional liftoff on my dragster she says okay i have something to tell you uh there were two other people that tied your score but they shifted identically to our perfect computer we had a comp a computer that did a perfect one 5.54 and they beat it using the same technique as the computer didn't they didn't understand how that could be possible so they disqualified the two people for retaining that score only because i was the one that shifted differently than their computer did the story now has multiple parts to it to unlock so we will go through one at a time first is there any evidence that activision simulated a perfect run of dragster that resulted in a 5.54 no every single piece of information about this story comes from todd and nowhere else it's almost impossible that it actually happened though as what todd is implying is artificial intelligence which was practically non-existent at the time it was a big deal when a full 15 years later a computer was able to beat gary kasparov in chess there is no chance an algorithm was created in 1982 to play dragster perfectly there are two other possibilities the first is that david crane somehow knew how to play dragster perfectly and crafted each input individually to create what speed runners call a tool assisted speed run these crafted runs aren't made by computers they are built by humans with a deep knowledge of game mechanics so this almost certainly didn't happen either if anything happened even remotely close to what rogers was referring to it was likely to have revolved around mathematics dragster is a reasonably simple game and you can use math to try to predict the optimal outcome the math that crane potentially used would have been very oversimplified which is why his result was not correct in 2017 it was proven by multiple people that 5.57 is actually the fastest possible time you can achieve when asked about his simulation in january of 2018 crane had this to say i have a vague recollection of writing test code to determine the best possible score but i don't remember the result and as i said if i did have a theoretical limit and a player beat it by such a small margin i would believe that player found a way to play the game that was different than the assumptions i used in calculating theoretical this paragraph is really important because it gives us crane's frame of mind he doesn't remember what he thought may have been the theoretical maximum but even if someone did beat it and by a small margin he would think nothing of it but this is the complete opposite of what todd is espousing according to rogers the other two players that also achieved 5.51 were disqualified by crane because they beat his time crane's statement confirms that is not what happened nor would it ever there was no statement or document from activision suggesting the other two players were disqualified because it simply never happened the phone call with jan marcella almost certainly never happened either think for a moment about the practicality of the situation crane predicts a theoretical best of 5.54 and then asks the customer relations representative a middle-aged woman whose job it is to sort mail to call rogers and the other two dragster record holders to ask them how they shifted their dragsters it literally makes zero sense by the way todd claims all of this happened throughout the middle of 1982 but we already know activision didn't print his score until almost a full year later so if this conversation happened why did activision not print todd's time until almost a year later and why if the other two players were disqualified were they not removed these are rhetorical questions obviously because the simple fact is that this conversation never happened [Music] if todd deserves a guinness world record it's for being the biggest hypocrite what always bugged me was the fact that todd threw the other two world record holders under the bus because of this alleged simulation but when it came to his own time the same standards did not apply the mountain of evidence supporting the case that todd had fabricated his 5.51 was far far larger than the evidence that supposedly had the other two players disqualified even david crane confirmed that players would have certainly proven their time with evidence to have their times posted in the activision's newsletter he stated activision validated todd's drags to score using the accepted methods of the day the time to question any of those records has passed he further stated those records were set at the time by a player at the time and given validation by the authority at the time thus those records should stand these statements seem really peculiar from someone that todd says disqualified two players who were already proven and validated obviously william stewart and kevin kobachesky proved their records to activision or they wouldn't have been featured in the first place is todd saying they faked their proof is todd suggesting that these two gentlemen are cheats did they doctor their photos why is he so quick to proclaim them as frauds when he didn't even speak to them even if his stories were true they were disqualified because of a phone call with activision's customer service representative that's hardly an exhaustive investigative process meanwhile todd has had 37 years to prove his record we have multiple programmers confirmed that 5.51 is not possible under any circumstances he spent two full days with ben heck who could input whatever strategy rogers wanted with perfect precision this achieved nothing he couldn't even get close to his record we have proof that roger's doctored certificates from activision all of his stories and the timelines in which they occur are demonstrably false but you know what todd's response to all of this is you weren't there going beyond just trying to do the program you insert the inputs the right time someone's actually looked at the code read the call in fact multiple people i get it i think it's three maybe four have looked at the code analyzed the call read the code and said i have looked at this code i've studied it it's less than 100 lines of code i know what's going on and after reading the code i am sure there's no way todd could have got the score what do you say to that well i say that they weren't there to watch me play it so are they go get a tardis and go back 35 years you'll be impressed all right well i have news for todd he wasn't there when the heroes william stewart and kevin kurpachevsky achieved the first legitimate 5.51 and these two champions were the ones who really deserved the recognition this entire time when todd rogers was banned from twin galaxies in early 2018 he made a response post on his facebook page there are a lot of lies in this post that relate to things that i haven't covered in this video but one part immediately struck me upon reading rogers stated i ask this had i not achieved the score in their presence why would activision have acknowledged me beating their perfect run and hired me to demonstrate their games what also seems to get overlooked is that i was only 16 and really had nothing to gain by fabricating an unobtainable score firstly we know that activision have already acknowledged two other people as having obtained 5.51 before it taught so it obviously didn't require people to achieve the score in their presence secondly todd demonstrated activision games in 1982 which was the year prior to his 5.51 being recognized in the activision's newsletter so it had no bearing on that at all thirdly todd had everything to gain by fabricating a score and todd himself has stated many times that the entire reason he submitted drags to scores in the first place was to gain recognition the following clips demonstrate that todd knew very well how much there was to gain and even confirms that gaining in general was his entire intention to begin with when atari came out i played that quite considerably and then activation which was a third party developer came up with a game called dragster uh when in the dragster's brochure it says if you beat this time of the dragster run you'll get recognition well that was my golden opportunity i got my start back in 1980 working for activision um i opened up a brochure one day playing deal atari and i saw that little list in there it says well if you want recognition break this score i thought that's my perfect opportunity to make a name for myself oh no i i got my big break in 1980 activision had published if you beat the score you'll get recognition that was in a game called dragster and that's what started the avalanche of working for many different companies because i would submit my scores and one particular show they wanted to see if i was the real deal that was in 1982 at the consumer electronic show in chicago and ever since that point on i've been playing professionally um for more than 42 software publishers in 1982 activision did indeed have todd demonstrate their games todd was getting a lot of attention and even appeared on a couple of brief tv segments his claim to fame was his records and he really believed he was becoming famous [Music] well they they enjoy the public scene um this meant a lot to todd and why wouldn't it it's a pretty big deal for a 17 year old but when the activision's newsletter came out in december of 1982 this would have crushed todd he was relying on his records to build his image and hopefully build a career he already had connections with activision so when he claimed a time of 5.51 as well i doubt they even requested proof the original 5.5 ones that were printed were likely due to a poor quality photo being misread the instructions from activision didn't actually specify you to write down the time on the back of the photograph so whomever checked the photos probably had to guess what the time was from the photo itself 5.51 isn't possible to achieve so obviously they never happened but once printed todd felt he had no choice but to claim it as well almost 20 years later in collusion with twin galaxies todd's record was inputted into the score database a fake story was constructed by todd and repeated by twin galaxies in order to gain clout for both parties several prominent twin galaxies members including billy mitchell and even walter day have been shown to be extremely corrupt so it was highly likely they all worked together to spread misinformation the cherry on the cake is that todd himself lobbied to guinness for four years to have his fake record recognized by them so guinness was impressed with this they published in their their book finally after four years of lobbying to them they published the longest held video gaming record on dragster for the 551 acknowledgement this was all intentionally orchestrated by todd rogers to gain money and recognition everything was pushed along by him with the help of the corrupt members of twin galaxies the key takeaway from this story is not simply that todd rogers is a man of low character it is a lesson that demonstrates just how easily people can be misled when they are quick to believe extraordinary claims without evidence if there is one person you should never believe without investigation it is the person that stands to gain from your belief today we haven't even covered the many scores that todd claimed that were later proven to be impossible the point is to show that it never should have gotten this far in the first place the evidence was already there years ago and the only reason todd gained as much recognition as he did was because of the laziness of journalists and people with platforms who enabled todd to spew his lies in front of thousands of people thank you so much for watching you absolute legends i hope you are having a fantastic day and i will see you in the next video todd rogers i mean that guy is so high on himself he can't even talk to

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 1,793,761

Rating: 4.8456244 out of 5

Keywords: karl jobst, dragster, atari 2600, retro gaming, video game cheaters, gaming documentary, classic gaming, activision, todd rogers, twin galaxies, billy mitchell

Id: PrH7aPmO61w

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/finch770]

The year 2031: Karl Jobst Jr. just skipped Surface 1:01 and put the WR at 1:00. His son is estimated to put it below the minute mark.

Congratulations, Karl!

[u/cradle_mountain]

I really like Karl’s videos but this one didn’t do it for me. I’m not going to be the guy who says “this story has been done before herr derr” because I believe in the idea of doing stories again in different ways and with new information. But... this particular vid’s angle was the depth of corruption in the Rodgers saga, yet we kind of already knew that shenanigans went down and that Rodgers was a pathological liar. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad video, however it didn’t really add much to the topic and ultimately I was a little bored watching it.

[u/Fierce_Deity_29]

it’s interesting that 2 other people not connected to Todd in any way also claimed a 5.51

Why would 3 people who have no connections to each other lie around the same period of time about having the exact same impossible time? What is the significance about the number 5.51 specifically?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm always sad when I try to watch his videos. Love the content but the way he speaks really kills me.