The 984-page Twin Galaxies book that cannot retract

The object is a brick. Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records, first published 8 February 1998, is 984 pages. ISBN 1-887472-25-8. Scores from players in 31 countries, compiled since 1981. You can still buy a used copy. You cannot issue a patch.

That is the whole piece, if you want it in one sentence. A database can retract. A book can only go out of print.

What the object actually is

Walter Day spent the 1980s writing high scores into magazines and into the 1984-1986 US editions of Guinness. When Guinness dropped the tables in 1988, the scores did not evaporate. They sat in Twin Galaxies' files. In 1997 Day and a volunteer referee network turned those files into a volume. The 1998 book is the first time the hobby bound itself between covers and called the binding official.

Open it and you do not get essays. You get tables. Game, player, score, sometimes a place and a date. The rulebook for how the score was supposed to be made lives in the same object as the score. Twin Galaxies wrote the first official rules for competitive electronic gaming. The book is both statute and result sheet.

A second edition was announced in 2007 as three volumes: arcade first, then console, then PC. The arcade volume, released 1 June 2007 by 1st World Publishing, ran about 800 pages on coin-op alone. A third arcade edition followed in June 2009, "filled with hundreds of updated world records." Day's own site still calls the publication the official record book of the worldwide electronic gaming industry.

Three editions. One problem they all share. Ink is not a leaderboard.

Paper cannot retract

On 30 January 2018 Twin Galaxies removed every score belonging to Todd Rogers and banned him. Rogers had been in the database since the early 1980s. His most famous number, 5.51 seconds on Activision's Dragster, sat for decades as an Atari 2600 world record. Later analysis treated it as effectively impossible on unmodified hardware. Some of the other Rogers scores had been entered by a friend who was also a Twin Galaxies referee.

The website can delete a row. The 1998 book cannot. Neither can the 2007 arcade volume, nor the 2009 update. Those copies are in libraries, in attics, in the collections of people who bought them as scripture. A teenager in 2007 who looked up Dragster found Todd Rogers. A teenager who finds the same copy in 2026 still finds Todd Rogers.

Billy Mitchell is in there too. The 1999 perfect Pac-Man. The Donkey Kong numbers that Twin Galaxies itself took down on 12 April 2018. The 2007 and 2009 printings went to press before that investigation existed. They will go to the grave claiming what the live board no longer claims.

Steve Sanders is a quieter case. In 1982 he told Walter Day he had 1.4 million on Donkey Kong. Life magazine photographed him in Ottumwa with the other champions. He later admitted the score was a lie. Twin Galaxies gave the record to Mitchell. Depending on which printing you hold, the ink may still remember the lie, or remember the man who replaced it, or both.

The book does not have a footnote that says "see the 2018 dispute thread." It has a page number.

Who is still in the ink who should not be

Anyone Twin Galaxies later banned is, in the physical copies, still a champion.

That list is longer than two names. The 1980s scoreboard was built on phone calls, Polaroids, referee affidavits and the reputation of a man in a striped shirt. Some of those scores were real. Some were theatre. The book flattened both into the same typeface.

This is not an argument for burning the volume. It is the best primary source the golden age has. Day visited about a hundred arcades in four months in 1981 before he even opened his own. The 984 pages are what that pilgrimage turned into. Without them, a lot of names would be forum folklore.

It is an argument for labelling the object. A 1998 score in a 1998 book is a claim made in 1998. It is not a 2026 verification. The copy you hold is a snapshot, and snapshots do not issue errata that crawl back into every other snapshot.

Museums already know this. They put a card next to the object. The card is not the object. HISCORE should treat imported Twin Galaxies rows the same way: imported, with the edition and the page if we have them, never verified because a hardcover said so.

What a protocol can do that a binding cannot

A website can add a second shelf. Twin Galaxies did that in January 2024 for Mitchell: historical database, not live board. A book would need a fourth edition, and then the first three editions would still be lying on desks.

So we do not print a fourth bible. We print provenance.

If we ingest a score from the 1998 volume, the record should say so. Game, player, score, source: Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records (1998), plus the page if known. If the same name was later banned on the live site, that fact belongs on the same row. The ink stays. The label changes.

The 984-page book is not a mistake. It is what you get when a culture that lived in arcades decided it deserved the same object baseball already had. Baseball's encyclopedias have asterisks. Ours should too. The difference is that baseball's asterisks were argued in public for a century. Ours are still hiding inside a binding that cannot be updated without printing another brick.

Hold the brick. Read the names. Then ask the only question the object cannot answer: who, on this page, would still be here if the page could blush.

Honesty table

Sources

• Twin Galaxies: 984-page first edition, 8 February 1998; second edition as three volumes, 2007; third edition 2009
• The Walter Day Collection: ISBN 1-887472-25-8; 31 countries; second arcade volume about 800 pages, 1 June 2007; third arcade edition June 2009; Day as author of the first official rulebook
• Amazon listing for the 2007 arcade volume: three-volume plan (arcade, console, PC)
• Digital Trends, 30 January 2018: Rogers banned, scores removed
• Variety, 12 April 2018: Mitchell removed
• Billy Mitchell (gamer)): Sanders's admitted fake 1.4 million, Life shoot, 1982
• HISCORE import-and-label practice: Why the protocol is shaped like this

Retrieved 18 August 2026.