When Guinness believed Twin Galaxies

Guinness World Records is a book that once believed an arcade in Iowa.

For a few years in the 1980s that belief was the closest thing video games had to a civil register. Twin Galaxies sent the numbers. Guinness printed them. A kid who held a record could put a finger on a page in a library and say the page knew. Then the book got bored, then it got interested again, then it fired its own supplier and rehired the player, and now there are two official truths about the same afternoon.

We will never be Guinness. We do not have a hardback, a TV format or a business that sells "most hot dogs." What we can be, if we stay small and boring in the right way, is the source a book like that would have to ring.

The years the book said yes

Walter Day opened Twin Galaxies on 10 November 1981. The National Scoreboard went public on 9 February 1982. By the summer, magazines were printing the tables. In 1983 the US National Video Game Team ran the Video Game Masters Tournament. The results landed in the 1984 US edition of the Guinness book.

That is the first belief. It had a shape: a referee, a machine, a number, a page. The page was the thing you could take to school.

In 1988 Guinness stopped publishing Twin Galaxies records. The stated reason, in later write-ups, was a decline in interest in arcade games. The crash had already closed Day's storefront in 1984. The book did what books do when a chapter stops selling. It closed the chapter.

For ten years the register was a church without a publisher. Day kept taking scores. In 1998 Twin Galaxies printed its own 984-page book. A second edition came as three volumes in 2007, a third in 2009. The hardback had moved house.

The years the book said yes again

Guinness came back as a specialist product. Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition launched for 2008, with Twin Galaxies in the credits as the partner that knew the cabinets. An archived Guinness page from that era called Twin Galaxies the official supplier of video game scores to the books. The sentence was still on Wikipedia, and on Twin Galaxies' own masthead, long after it had stopped being simple.

The second belief was more corporate than the first. There was a logo, an annual, a TV-friendly list of "most points on Pac-Man." The cabinet was still far away. The page was still the prize.

On 30 January 2018, after Todd Rogers's Dragster 5.51 collapsed under a disassembly that put the floor at 5.57, Guinness put out a statement: Twin Galaxies is "our trusted adviser on videogame high scores and as such we rely on it to monitor high score gaming." Twelve weeks later that sentence was a trap.

The split

On 12 April 2018 Twin Galaxies removed Billy Mitchell's scores and banned him. The finding, on the Donkey Kong tapes that had held the King of Kong number, the Mortgage Brokers number and later the Boomers number, was that an unmodified original board did not output the display in the videos. Guinness followed. It stripped the Donkey Kong records and, because Twin Galaxies had been the original source, the 3 July 1999 perfect Pac-Man of 3,333,360 as well.

Mitchell sued. Guinness, on 17 June 2020, published a reversal. The Records Management Team had "unanimously decided" to restore the historical arcade records:

• 3 July 1999, first perfect Pac-Man, 3,333,360
• 7 November 1982, Donkey Kong 874,300, and first kill screen
• 4 June 2005, Donkey Kong 1,047,200, first million
• 14 July 2007, Donkey Kong 1,050,200
• 31 July 2010, Donkey Kong 1,062,800

The reason, in Guinness's words: "compelling new evidence," "key eyewitness and expert testimonials." Twin Galaxies did not move. For four years the book and the supplier disagreed about the same tapes. In January 2024 Twin Galaxies and Mitchell settled. The scores went onto a historical database of pre-2014 records, not onto the live board. Mitchell stayed banned from new submissions.

So there are now, depending on which door you open, a Guinness yes, a Twin Galaxies historical yes, and a Twin Galaxies live no. The cabinet cannot be in three states. The paper can.

A third referee with no cabinet

Guinness did not stand in Funspot on 3 July 1999. It did not open the Donkey Kong board in 2005. It did not run the MAME comparison in 2018. It took a feed, then it took a different feed.

That is not an insult. It is the job description of a general record book. Guinness adjudicates the longest beard and the fastest 100 metres with different instruments. For arcade scores the instrument was, for decades, a small American organisation with a forum. When the organisation and the player went to court, the book had to become a court of its own, without the hardware.

A third referee with no cabinet will always be in this position. The closer the dispute gets to pixels and joysticks, the more the book is repeating someone else's homework. In 2018 the homework said cheat. In 2020 the homework said not proven. Both homeworks were done in rooms Guinness does not own.

The useful reading is not "Guinness is corrupt" or "Guinness is wise." The useful reading is that a general authority cannot be the first authority on a cabinet. It can only be the last page.

What we will not be, and what we can be

We will not be Guinness.

We will not print a yearbook. We will not send a framed certificate. We will not have a television producer who needs a name that an uncle in another country has heard of. We will not be the last page.

We can be the first page that a last page would have to call.

That means boring things, done in public:

• Every number carries a source and a tier. submitted, measured, imported, verified. The server writes the tier. The sender does not.
• An imported Twin Galaxies row says Twin Galaxies. An imported speedrun.com row says speedrun.com. A Guinness line that cites us should be able to see which of those it is standing on.
• Two numbers that are not comparable do not share a rank. Points and times stay in their units. A kill screen gets a flag so the ending is visible.
• If we change our mind about a row, the old row stays in the log. Guinness's 2018 no and 2020 yes cannot be understood without both dates. A register that overwrites itself is not a register.

We cannot stop a future book from being wrong. We can make it expensive to be wrong without looking at the log.

The 1984 page worked because someone in Ottumwa had already done the standing. The 2008 annual worked, when it worked, for the same reason. The 2020 split is what happens when the last page tries to become the first page in a fight about a board it has never opened.

Keep the cabinet closer than the hardback. Keep the source closer than the sticker. If Guinness ever has to call, the answer should already be on the row.

Honesty table

Sources

• Twin Galaxies: 1981-1983 timeline, 1984 Guinness, 1988 stop (citing Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 2008), 1998/2007/2009 books, supplier relationship
• Guinness statement, 30 January 2018: TG as trusted adviser
• Guinness statement, 17 June 2020: five restored records, unanimous reversal
• Ars Technica, 18 June 2020: the split
• Ars Technica, 16 January 2024 and Twin Galaxies statement: historical database, live ban
• Variety, 12-13 April 2018: TG ban and Guinness follow
• Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008 as the return vehicle
• HISCORE provenance

Retrieved 18 August 2026.