2026-08-18
On 3 July 1999 in Laconia, Billy Mitchell scored 3,333,360 on Pac-Man in nearly six hours. Twin Galaxies later stripped his Donkey Kong. Guinness put the records back.
2026-08-18
Willis Gibson reached level 157 on 21 December 2023, scored 6,850,560, and the NES froze. First human kill screen. Guinness logged it. The useful part for a score protocol is what you write in unit and dir when the game ends by breaking.
2026-08-18
Day's memoir, DeMaria's High Score!, Donovan's Replay, the Twin Galaxies volumes. There is still no great novel of the high-score hunter.
2026-08-18
The Classic Tetris World Championship has run since 2010. Three input religions, two Artiaga brothers, a trophy recast as a gold J. A field guide to a sister civilisation, not another cute clip.
2026-08-18
In 2020 speedrun.com spent two months on Dream's Any% drop rates. A 29-page paper. A confession. The new clerk is a volunteer website.
2026-08-18
Adam Cornelius's 2011 documentary built a championship to settle a message board. Donkey Kong got a theatrical villain. Tetris got a 93-minute cult tape and Thor Aackerlund as a ghost.
2026-08-18
Billy Mitchell's perfect Pac-Man happened on the third floor in Laconia, New Hampshire, on one quarter, in nearly six hours. The arcade is still open. A URL can hold a number. It cannot hold the carpet.
2026-08-18
Castle Super Beast, Remap Radio, The Besties, 8-4 Play and Retronauts cover almost everything games talk about. None of them is the show about the number on the machine. That absence is the map.
2026-08-18
A GoldenEye champion became the referee YouTube never hired. 52 seconds on Dam. Then a Queensland court, A$350,000, and a hole where an institution should be.
2026-08-18
Three crashes, three feelings. Pac-Man turns the maze into garbage. Donkey Kong gives you four seconds and takes your last life. NES Tetris dies in your hands and that death is the prize. HISCORE needs a way to say the run ended because the machine did.
2026-08-18
Seth Gordon's 2007 documentary followed Steve Wiebe after Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong record, ran 79 minutes, and became the rulebook for every score fight that came after it.
2026-08-18
Joseph Saelee swept Jonas Neubauer 3-0 at CTWC 2018. The clip passed 20 million YouTube views. What changed was the input method, not a fairy tale about a kid and a king.
2026-08-18
One YouTube channel turned high-score lineages into a film form. 2.14 million subscribers, 282 million views, and a grammar we will steal.
2026-08-18
Walter Day's 1998 record book is 984 pages. A second edition split into volumes in 2007. Paper cannot retract. Who is still in the ink?
2026-08-18
A 13-year-old from Houston won the Nintendo World Championships, took a Geo Metro and a golden Mario, taught Tetris a new pair of thumbs, and stepped off the stage. The heaven is 1990 and the later Tetris. The missing years sit in the middle, where they belong.
2026-08-18
Todd Rogers's 5.51 on Atari 2600 Dragster stood from 1982 until 29 January 2018. Tool-assisted play cannot beat 5.57. Twin Galaxies wiped the board.
2026-08-18
One church keeps time. One church keeps score. They are specialists, and they are not us. The missing object is the table that can hold both without pretending to replace either.
2026-08-18
Twin Galaxies supplied Guinness, then stopped, then supplied again. In 2018 both banned Billy Mitchell. In 2020 only one book took him back.
2026-08-18
Walter Day bought an arcade in Ottumwa in 1981, took children's high scores seriously, and in 1998 published a 984-page book. A database is a civilization.
2026-08-18
Guinness printed TG scores, stopped in 1988, came back, then split with its own supplier over Billy Mitchell. A third referee with no cabinet. We will never be Guinness. We can be the source they would have to call.
2026-08-18
From 14 to 18 February 2013 in a New Jersey arcade, George Leutz scored 37,163,080 on one coin. Endurance, not aim. Guinness still lists it. Grantland sent David Jacoby.
2026-08-18
Steve Wiebe scored 1,006,600 on Donkey Kong on 4 July 2004, the first million on the game. The cabinet was in his garage. The number outlived the movie that made him a victim.
2026-08-18
Hank Chien took Donkey Kong in 2010 with 1,061,700. Robbie Lakeman and Wes Copeland then traded the record inside six hours. A high score is a market, not a monument.
2026-08-18
Jonas Neubauer won the Classic Tetris World Championship seven times, died in 2021 at 39, and left one sentence on a golden J-tetromino. Heaven is the table and that line.
2026-08-18
Board 256 splits. The perfect game is 3,333,360. Nine dots hide in the garbage, six lives are not enough. Reagan wrote to Jeffrey Yee about 6,131,940, a number the board cannot produce. The public wants a figure more than a proof.
2026-08-18
On 15 January 1984 at Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Tim McVey scored 1,000,042,270 on Nibbler. One coin. 44 hours 45 minutes. The billion became a unit. Man vs Snake filmed the afterlife in 2015.
2026-08-10
Until now there was no place in the world where you could look up who is currently on top in any given game. Now there is. The Hall of Fame.
2026-08-10
6.9 million people go live every month, but only 93,000 at any one moment. The most-watched game on Twitch is not a game. And attention is skewed even harder than the catalogue is large.
2026-08-10
We are not tearing down walls. The interesting games are being built in places where no wall was ever put up, and nobody has a map of them. So we are drawing one.
2026-08-08
The honest answer is that it depends what you call a game. Depending on the definition it is 331,000, 2 million or 45 million. All three are correct, and the distance between them is the actual story.
2026-08-05
Every field in HISCORE is a decision, and four of them were wrong at first. This is the reasoning behind the shape, including what we reversed and why. The definition itself lives elsewhere.
2026-08-05
Games from the 2000s are worse preserved than films from the 1920s. The people fixing it are not companies or universities. They are five YouTubers, a fan database from 1999, and a man with a box of videotapes.
2026-08-04
A field guide to every serious game aggregator, from the 1999 archivists to the directories that appeared this year. Including the shape of the hole all of them share.
2026-08-04
Software ate the world and never stopped. It is coming back through the most playful interface humans ever built, and the numbers are already there to prove it.
2026-08-04
Twenty years of platforms that promised to pay indie developers, and the numbers on which ones did. Four models worked, four failed, and the difference between them is not the percentage.
2026-08-04
itch.io holds more than a million games, three times the biggest games database on earth, and over half of them were made for a jam. Thirteen years of growth that almost no index has ever looked at.
2026-08-04
The complete year-by-year series from 14 games in 2004 to 18,119 in 2025, the one modern year the number actually fell, and what happened to the crowd waiting behind it.
2026-08-04
Every independent cross-game leaderboard ever built is dead. One gave developers thirty days notice. Before we ask anyone to embed our code, here is the honest history, and who actually runs the portal everyone is linking to.
2026-08-04
There is a real answer, and there is the reason almost every published ranking is comparing things that cannot be compared. Plus where to actually look, and the three places where nobody is counting at all.
2026-08-04
Avatars, gamertags, blockchain IDs and cross-game leaderboards. Almost all of them are dead, one is twenty years old and serves eight billion requests a day, and the difference between them is not the technology.
2026-08-04
Every post I made about this thesis, in order, in full. Seventeen months from a stray thought in February 2025 to a reflex I fire off under other people's timelines. This is the receipt.
2026-08-04
robots.txt ran for twenty-eight years with no standard at all. Trackback had verification and still died of spam. Six lessons from the protocol graveyard, written while designing one.
2026-08-04
132 million people a day, 31 billion hours a quarter, and the first negative bookings guidance in the company's history. Twenty-two years of the strongest evidence for our thesis and the sharpest warning attached to it.
2026-08-04
The median game released on Steam last year grossed 249 dollars. The median game costs tens of thousands to build. Here is what that gap does, and where the money actually is.
2026-08-04
One tournament pays 75 million dollars this year. The tournament that used to hold the record fell 93 percent. Who pays players now, and what changed about where the money comes from.
2026-08-04
Live figures on the games market, with source and date, plus the cross-connections nobody else bothers to make.
2026-08-04
Developers who built something that outlived its launch week. Pre-filled, ranking still to come.
2026-08-04
Started with one account we actually read. The rest gets added as we find them, not guessed.
2026-08-04
The people and tools at the centre of AI-written games. Pre-filled, ranking still to come.
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