GAMES ARE
EATING THE WORLD

2026-08-18

Twin Galaxies vs Guinness: a record true in one book

Twin Galaxies supplied Guinness, then stopped, then supplied again. In 2018 both banned Billy Mitchell. In 2020 only one book took him back.

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A score can be a world record in London and a deleted row in Iowa on the same afternoon. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records have been the two referees of arcade history for more than forty years, and they have not always called the same game.

This is the living twin of our graveyard of global leaderboards. That piece is about boards that died. This one is about two boards that stayed alive and then disagreed.

Twin Galaxies supplied Guinness, then not, then did

Walter Day opened the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, on 10 November 1981. The public scoreboard followed on 9 February 1982. From the summer of 1983 Twin Galaxies became the official supplier of verified video-game scores to Guinness. Day was named assistant editor for the 1984, 1985 and 1986 US editions. The first time Guinness treated games as a category, the clerk was a man in a striped shirt in a corn-belt arcade.

In 1988 Guinness stopped printing those tables. Arcade fever had cooled. Twin Galaxies kept the books anyway. On 8 February 1998 Day published Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records, 984 pages of scores compiled since 1981. A second edition arrived in 2007 as a planned three-volume set. A third arcade volume followed in 2009.

The partnership came back. In 2008 Guinness launched the Gamer's Edition. Twin Galaxies was again the trusted adviser. A 2018 Guinness statement still called the Iowa database its source for videogame high scores.

So the chain is not a myth: Twin Galaxies supplied Guinness, then it did not, then it did. Two stamps, one pipeline, until the pipeline had to decide what a tape was.

What 12 April 2018 actually did

On 12 April 2018 Twin Galaxies published its decision on Billy Mitchell. The taped Donkey Kong performances of 1,047,200 (the King of Kong tape) and 1,050,200 (the Mortgage Brokers score) were "not produced by the direct feed output of an original unmodified Donkey Kong Arcade PCB." All of Mitchell's scores came off the board. He was banned from future submissions.

The next day Guinness followed. Its language was institutional, not technical. Twin Galaxies was "our source of verification." If the source dropped the scores, Guinness dropped them too, including the 3 July 1999 perfect Pac-Man of 3,333,360, a run Twin Galaxies had not itself called fake on hardware grounds. The Pac-Man perfect game left the book because the clerk had left the other book.

That is the first useful sentence in this story. Guinness did not re-score the tapes in 2018. It inherited a ban.

Mitchell sued. Twin Galaxies countersued. The case ran for years.

2020: only one book took him back

On 18 June 2020 Guinness announced a reversal. Editor-in-chief Craig Glenday said the organisation had reviewed existing evidence, new eyewitness testimony and new hardware analysis, and found there "wasn't sufficient evidence to support the disqualification across the board." In a debate, Guinness would "typically defer to the original contemporaneous adjudication."

The restored titles were historical firsts, not live first place. First perfect Pac-Man, 3 July 1999. First Donkey Kong million, 2005. Twin Galaxies did not move. CEO Jace Hall answered a reporter with a meme.

From that week a record could be true in one book and false in the other. Not as a joke. As the published state of the field.

2024: Iowa invents a second shelf

In January 2024 Mitchell and Twin Galaxies settled. Terms stayed confidential. Twin Galaxies put the scores back onto a static "historical database" of pre-2014 entries, the years before Jace Hall took custody. They did not return to the live leaderboard. Mitchell remains banned from Twin Galaxies competitions.

Read that again. Faced with a score it would not call live and would not leave deleted, Twin Galaxies built a second list with different rules. We already wrote that sentence about the graveyard. It is still the most useful design fact in scorekeeping.

Guinness, in 2020, had done a softer version of the same move: restore the firsts, leave the present alone.

Two referees. Two shelves. One afternoon in which a number is both history and a problem.

What a court can settle, and what it cannot

The 2024 settlement did not decide whether the tapes show MAME. It decided what two companies could live with. A later forensic report (September 2022, Tanner Fokkens and five other analysts) still argued the stage transitions match emulation. Photographs from the 2007 mortgage-brokers convention, published in 2023, show a joystick that looks eight-way on a four-way game. Mitchell's camp produced expert testimony that the tapes are too degraded to prove the hardware. Walter Day, who had left Twin Galaxies in 2010, publicly welcomed the Guinness restore.

None of that is a verdict on the man. It is a verdict on the institution. Two referees, given the same tape, wrote two books.

Why HISCORE prints provenance instead of a gavel

We are not a court. We will not become one.

A HISCORE record carries a provenance the server sets: submitted, signed, measured, imported, verified. The sender never chooses the word. A signed score means the game's own server attested the number. It does not mean the number happened. A verified score means a human looked. It does not mean the tape is sacred.

Twin Galaxies vs Guinness is what happens when two institutions pretend the stamp is the event. One stamp followed the other for thirty-five years. Then one stamp reversed and the other did not. The event (a man, a cabinet, a camera, a summer) did not change between 2018 and 2020. The clerks did.

The honest board does not ask you to pick a church. It prints how the number arrived, and it lets two numbers sit next to each other with different labels. If London and Iowa disagree, both rows stay, with the disagreement on the row.

That is cheaper than a lawsuit and more useful than a ban. It is also the only promise a new board can keep without becoming the third referee in a fight it cannot win.

Honesty table

KindClaim
FactTwin Galaxies supplied Guinness for the 1984-1986 US editions, the pipeline paused in 1988, and the Gamer's Edition from 2008 put the two names back in the same sentence.
FactOn 12 April 2018 Twin Galaxies removed Mitchell's scores and banned him. Guinness followed on 13 April, including the 1999 perfect Pac-Man.
FactOn 18 June 2020 Guinness restored the historical firsts. Twin Galaxies did not restore them to the live board. The January 2024 settlement put them on a historical shelf. Mitchell stays banned from TG competitions.
HypothesisGuinness's 2020 restore was as much a legal and reputational decision as a technical one. Confidence: medium. Mitchell himself said a confidentiality agreement covered "the legal agreement," while also saying the defamation case against Guinness was already weak.
HypothesisAny future universal board that offers a single "official" stamp will be forced into the same split the first time two experts disagree on a tape. Confidence: high.
FolkloreThat there is one true Donkey Kong record, sitting in one book, waiting for a righteous clerk. There isn't. There are tapes, stamps, and shelves.

Sources

Retrieved 18 August 2026.