In the early 1980s the world records for arcade games were kept in a small town in Iowa, by a man who sold ice cream. Walter Day opened the Twin Galaxies arcade on Main Street, Ottumwa, in 1981, and by early 1983 he was taking 50 to 70 phone calls a day from players reporting scores. Nobody had appointed him. As he explained it in 1983, he had simply called the magazines and the game manufacturers and told them he was going to do it. They printed his tables, Life came to photograph his players, and Ottumwa, a town of 27,000 people, was proclaimed “the Video Game Capital of the World” by the governor of Iowa.
The arcade is long gone, but the name survived as a record-keeping organisation. It supplied the video game records in Guinness World Records, and in 2018, under new owners, it removed every score held by the best-known player of the arcade era, Billy Mitchell. The lawsuit that followed ran until 2024.
Fast facts
- Opened: 1981, as an arcade with 22 games on Main Street, Ottumwa, Iowa, with a sister arcade in Kirksville, Missouri.
- Founder: Walter Day, with his partner Jonathan Bloch.
- The scoreboard: the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard, compiled from early 1982.
- In print: high-score tables in Video Games, JoyStik, Computer and Video Games and others; later, its own book of world records.
- Owners since 2014: a company led by Jace Hall.
A Defender score nobody could check
Day told the story in several versions, but its core stays the same. A player at Twin Galaxies ran up a huge score on Williams’ Defender, about 24 million points by Day’s account to Blip in February 1983, and everyone wondered whether it was a record. Nobody knew. “So we decided to call it the official record until we heard otherwise,” Day said. “We did the same thing for other games.” Video Games dated the moment to January 1982. Day alerted the trade papers and the manufacturers to his plan: “I didn’t tell them we might do it, or that we wanted to know if they wanted us to do it. I just said we’re going to do this and we want to know if you’re interested and they were.” Half an hour after he hung up, the first long-distance call came in, from Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
The arcade itself was not making him rich. “I decided I would start a video game arcade,” Day told Video Games, “because I read all those articles in Time and Newsweek that told me that I was going to be a millionaire if I opened up a video game arcade.” A year and a half later he was paying himself $25 to $30 a week. The front of the arcade sold “Big Johnny and Uncle Walter’s All-American Brand Ice Cream”, and Day, a collector, hung old newspapers and school yearbooks on the walls.
The scores went into a computer. By 1983 the scoreboard was run by a volunteer, Bob Bradfield, and two local teenagers, 15-year-old Lyle Holman and 14-year-old Mark Hoff, on Radio Shack machines running an 8K program they had written. None of them was paid. “It has to be designed so that we’re not favoring any one manufacturer and that every arcade is getting a fair shake,” Bradfield said.
Checking the claims
A score reached the board when the player returned a form with signatures from the arcade operator and other witnesses. By late 1983 JoyStik was asking for the machine’s bonus and difficulty settings too. Bradfield said that if a claim looked doubtful, “we will then require that person to play the game in front of us”. The expert players helped. Holman remembered a caller who claimed 11 million on Donkey Kong, nine million of it on his last man, at level 22. Day told him to ring Bill Mitchell, the top Donkey Kong player, who knew the claim was wrong: “You can’t get past level 22 unless you get there on the first guy.” Holman added: “So, that was the end of him.”
Signed forms could not stop a determined liar. Steve Sanders, author of a Donkey Kong strategy book and one of Day’s regulars, had a score of 1.4 million accepted as the world record in 1982. In April 1983 he wrote to Day and to a dozen other record holders admitting that he had made it up; he told the Italian magazine Computer Games that he had first lied to get onto a poster of record holders that Day was compiling. Day struck him from the scoreboard.
In the magazines
The new American games magazines needed exactly what Day had. In its first issue, in August 1982, Video Games printed the “top scores of 14 games tabulated at Day’s Video Central” and described his effort “to establish the Twin Galaxies as the national headquarters for record video scores”. JoyStik’s first issue, in September 1982, printed a table of 21 arcade records with the note: “Walt Day is a pioneer in the research and verification of high video-game scores.” By December 1983 JoyStik was listing 101 games and telling readers to send their scores to Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard, 226 E. Main St., Ottumwa.
The news crossed the Atlantic. In August 1983 Computer and Video Games told British readers that the town now housed “the only official international scoreboard for video games”, taking 50 to 60 calls a day, and gave the number to dial from Britain. In June 1986 it printed a table of world high scores “as compiled by Twin Galaxies International”. Twin Galaxies was not the only claimant, though: in July 1988 ZZAP!64 printed the table of the Amusement Players Association of Torrance, California, which called its own list “the World’s official arcade game highscore table”, though several of its records had been set at Twin Galaxies.
Life, That’s Incredible! and the video game capital
In November 1982 Life gathered the country’s top players at Twin Galaxies and photographed them in front of the scoreboard. Blip reported that 18 players had been invited. One of them was Ben Gold, a 16-year-old from Dallas who had set the Stargate record that September.
On 8 and 9 January 1983 the arcade staged what Day called the North American Video Game Olympics. Nineteen players spent two days on five games, Joust, Frogger, Millipede, Donkey Kong Jr. and Super Pac-Man, with a computer for each game turning scores into percentages of the best. ABC’s That’s Incredible! filmed it, and the three finalists, Todd Walker, Ben Gold and Darren Olson, played the final in Los Angeles for the programme. Gold won. According to Video Games, President Reagan telephoned to say he could not attend.
In March 1983 Iowa’s governor, Terry Branstad, came to the arcade with representatives of Atari and the Amusement Game Manufacturers Association to declare Ottumwa the video game capital of the world. Electronic Games reported a “Videogame Parade” with Iowa’s two senators, a congressman and Pac-Man himself.
The Electronic Circus and the national team
That spring a Boston events company, Meeting Planners, courted Day’s players for the Electronic Circus, a touring show with 500 arcade machines and a “Superstars” stage on which the top-ranked players would defend their titles against all comers. The organiser, Jim Riley, told the players at Twin Galaxies that the number one would earn about $3,000 a week. Ben Gold had doubts: “When we start competing against each other, then we’re going to start hating each other.” The circus closed after two days, Computer Games reported in 1984. “The bus broke down,” Day told Edge twenty years later.
Day kept the idea of a team. In late 1983 JoyStik described a “U.S. Olympic Video Game Team” that had toured the country holding statewide tournaments, with Gold, Mitchell and Steve Harris among its players. As the U.S. National Video Game Team it played on for years: in 1984 K-Power said it was being formed to play champions from Italy, Canada and Japan; in September 1987 Commodore User announced that it would play a British team on Mastertronic’s stand at the PCW Show in London; and in January 1989 the first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly carried its “Game of the Month” endorsements.
The book and the perfect game
In the 1990s Twin Galaxies widened its tables to home consoles and pinball. By 1999 it had published the Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records, which Classic Gamer Magazine described as a “massive 936 page collection”. At the 1999 Classic Gaming Expo, players could try for a place in the next edition. In July 1999 Billy Mitchell played the first perfect game of Pac-Man, recognised by Twin Galaxies: 3,333,360 points, through all 256 levels, taking every bonus and every blue ghost without losing a life. By 2004 Twin Galaxies was also recording the fastest times through console games, on videotape from real hardware, as the speedrunning community grew.
Its records went into Guinness World Records. In 2018 Guinness called Twin Galaxies its “trusted advisor on video game high scores”.
New owners and the Mitchell dispute
Walter Day stepped back from Twin Galaxies around 2010, and in 2014 it was acquired by Jace Hall, who set up a public process for disputing scores. The first high-profile case came in January 2018, when Twin Galaxies removed all the scores of Todd Rogers. His famous time of 5.51 seconds in Activision’s Dragster for the Atari 2600 had been challenged after a speedrunner who studied the game’s code argued it was impossible. Guinness followed within a day. Rogers wrote that he disagreed with the decision, while applauding the organisation’s “strong stance on the matter of cheating”.
In February 2018 a member of the site, Jeremy Young, disputed three of Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong scores of more than a million points. These included the performance on videotape that had been shown in The King of Kong (2007), a documentary about Mitchell’s rivalry with Steve Wiebe. On 12 April 2018 Twin Galaxies ruled that the recordings of two of the scores “were not produced by the direct feed output of an original unmodified Donkey Kong Arcade PCB”, as its rules required. It said it could not prove that the emulator MAME had been used, but it removed all of Mitchell’s scores and banned him from its leaderboards. It announced that, by its findings, Wiebe was the first player to score a million points. Guinness removed Mitchell’s records as well.
Mitchell denied the findings. In April 2019 he sued Twin Galaxies for defamation in Los Angeles County Superior Court, arguing that its statement implied he was “a cheater who deserved punishment”. In June 2020 Guinness reinstated his Donkey Kong and Pac-Man records. Its editor-in-chief, Craig Glenday, said it had found insufficient evidence “to support the disqualification across the board”, and that in disputed cases it would “defer to the original contemporaneous adjudication”. Twin Galaxies stood by its ruling. It later filed a cross-complaint, which alleged, in the words of the filing, that Mitchell and Walter Day had “engaged in a decades-long fraud” to build up the value of the database. Each side accused the other of misconduct in the evidence-gathering stage of the case.
In January 2024, three months before the trial, the two sides reached a confidential settlement. Twin Galaxies then put all of Mitchell’s scores back in a new “historical database”, a copy of the records it had bought in 2014, citing an expert witness’s view that the disputed tapes could show original hardware if that hardware was malfunctioning. His scores did not return to its current Donkey Kong leaderboards, and he remained barred from submitting new ones. Mitchell said he was “relieved and satisfied to reach this resolution after an almost six-year ordeal”. In April 2025 an Australian court awarded him A$350,000 in a separate defamation case against the YouTuber Karl Jobst. The court noted that it had not been asked to decide whether Mitchell had cheated.
Sources
- Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, p. 14: “top scores of 14 games tabulated at Day’s Video Central”; the Galaxian record of 30 November 1981 at Ottumwa.
- JoyStik vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, p. 63: high-score table and “Walt Day is a pioneer in the research and verification of high video-game scores.”
- Blip vol. 1 no. 1, February 1983: Day’s account of the Defender score and “call it the official record until we heard otherwise”. Vol. 1 no. 3, April 1983: Life “assembled the 18 best video game players at the Twin Galaxies Arcade”.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 7, April 1983: the Video Game Olympics of 8–9 January 1983, 19 players, five games, the scoring by percentage, the three finalists and Reagan’s call.
- Vidiot vol. 1 no. 3, May 1983: the North American Video Game Olympics, 8–9 January, and its finalists.
- Sue Adamo, “Reaching the Top in Ottumwa, Iowa”, Video Games vol. 1 no. 10, July 1983, pp. 29–36: the calls from the magazines and manufacturers, the first call from Goodlettsville, Day’s quotes, his pay and the ice cream, Jonathan Bloch, the scoreboard team and its verification rules, the level-22 story, Life in November 1982, That’s Incredible!, the governor’s visit, the Electronic Circus plans and the players’ quotes, and Ottumwa’s population.
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 8, October 1983, p. 10: Governor Branstad’s proclamation and the Videogame Parade.
- Computer and Video Games issue 22, August 1983: “the only official international scoreboard for video games”. Issue 56, June 1986: world high scores “as compiled by Twin Galaxies International”.
- JoyStik vol. 2 no. 3, December 1983: the high-score list and submission rules; the U.S. Olympic Video Game Team; Ben Gold’s record and Life.
- Computer Games (Italy) vol. 1 no. 4, July 1984, pp. 34–36: the Electronic Circus closing after two days; Steve Sanders’s 1.4 million score, his admission and removal from the scoreboard; Life’s visit in November 1982.
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 4, May 1984, p. 6: the 1984 U.S. National Video Game Team.
- Commodore User, September 1987: the U.S. National Video Game Team against a British team at the PCW Show.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, January 1989: the team’s “Game of the Month”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 39, July 1988: the Amusement Players Association International Scoreboard.
- Classic Gamer Magazine vol. 1 no. 2, June 1999: review of the Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records. Digital Press issue 40, July 1999: Twin Galaxies at the Classic Gaming Expo.
- Digital Press issue 53, July 2003: Steve Wiebe’s Donkey Kong record of 30 June 2003, verified by Twin Galaxies.
- Edge issue 128, October 2003: high-score feature; Mitchell’s perfect Pac-Man in July 1999; Day on the Electronic Circus (“The bus broke down”).
- Retro Gamer issue 11, 2004: the arcade’s 22 games; Twin Galaxies’ rules for speed runs.
- Kotaku, “Guinness Officially Nixes Todd Rogers’ Dragster Records”, 30 January 2018 (web, secondary): Twin Galaxies’ removal of Rogers’s scores, Guinness’s statement and Rogers’s reply. https://kotaku.com/guinness-officially-nixes-todd-rogers-dragster-records-1822568394
- Brian Crecente, “‘King of Kong’ Star Stripped of High Scores, Banned From Competition”, Variety, 12 April 2018 (web, secondary), quoting Twin Galaxies’ ruling in full. https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/king-of-kong-stripped-of-title-1202751358/
- Kyle Orland, “Billy Mitchell takes his Donkey Kong high-score cheating case to court”, Ars Technica, 4 May 2020 (web, secondary): the April 2019 filing and Mitchell’s complaint. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/billy-mitchell-takes-his-donkey-kong-high-score-cheating-case-to-court/
- Kyle Orland, “Guinness reinstates Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong, Pac-Man records”, Ars Technica, June 2020 (web, secondary): Glenday’s statement. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/guinness-reinstates-billy-mitchells-donkey-kong-pac-man-records/
- Courthouse News Service, “Notorious arcade gamer Billy Mitchell settles suit over Donkey Kong world record”, January 2024 (web, secondary): the settlement, the 2014 purchase and the cross-complaint. https://www.courthousenews.com/notorious-arcade-gamer-billy-mitchell-settles-suit-over-donkey-kong-world-record/
- Kyle Orland, “After settlement, Billy Mitchell’s scores go up on Twin Galaxies’ ‘historic database’”, Ars Technica, 16 January 2024 (web, secondary). https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/01/twin-galaxies-billy-mitchell-settle-donkey-kong-score-case-before-trial/
- “Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst”, The Guardian, 1 April 2025 (web, secondary). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/01/donkey-kong-champion-billy-mitchell-wins-defamation-case-australia-youtuber-karl-jobst-ntwnfb
- Wikipedia, “Twin Galaxies” and “Todd Rogers (gamer)” (web, secondary): the opening date, Day’s departure around 2010, and the Dragster analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Galaxies