Pac-man Fever!

While I'm on the subject of Pac-Man, here's an interesting tidbit of Pac-history.

I was reading an article at Twin Galaxies' - the official authority on videogame records - describing perhaps the single most awe-inspiring Pac-Man moment of all time, the first perfect score on a game of Pac-Man, achieved by Billy Mitchell - a Fort Lauderdale, Florida hot sauce manufacturer - on July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M. at the Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, NH.

Now, in order to get a perfect score on Pac-Man, a player has to achieve a score of 3,333,360 points - the maximum possible points allowed by the game. This means eating every last dot, every energizer, killing every blue ghost, getting every fruit and surviving to the 256th level, which ends in a split-screen. All of this must all be accomplished on a single quarter - which is why in the game's 20 years of existence, nobody was able to accomplish the feat - even though by Twin Galaxies's best estimates, the game has been played somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000,000,000 times since it's introduction.

The Perfect Pac-Man Game became an arcade Mount Everest of sorts and was a hotly contested badge of honor sought by the world's hardest-core joystick-jockeys...these guys were dead serious - listen to this snippet from the Galaxies article:

Mitchell, who refused to eat until he beat the Canadians for the world record, went hungry for nearly two full days. “I had to be first,” Mitchell explains. “Its like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. No matter how many people accomplish the feat afterwards, it will always be Armstrong who will be remembered for doing it first. And, best of all, it was an American.”

I'm not sure if it was quite as big a deal as the first moonwalk, but for Billy Mitchell, it was the pinnacle of his gaming career - an illustrious one, too - Billy also holds the world record for Donkey Kong.
In the end, with the grueling six-hour game behind him, eyes bloodshot, victory his at last, Billy backed away from the machine and announced:

“I never have to play that darn game again,” he sighed in relief. “There’s nothing more I can accomplish.”

Said like a true American hero. This Bud's for you, Billy.

Click here for an interview with Billy about his perfect game on Videogames.com and if this got you in the mood to chomp a few dots, you can find some Pac-Man Clones here.