Fun_People Archive
16 Aug
The First Perfect Game of Pac-Man

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 99 16:08:56 -0700
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: The First Perfect Game of Pac-Man

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
Forwarded-by: chuck@NYC.Thinkbank.COM (Chuck Ocheret)
Forwarded-by: mskoner@earthlink.net

	01:19 AM ET 07/17/99

1st Perfect Game of Pac-Man Played

           COOPER CITY, Fla. (AP) _ Baseball has produced 15 perfect games
 in more than 120 years of the major leagues. Now, after 19 years, Pac-Man
 has its first.
           Billy Mitchell, 34, become the first person to master the video
 arcade classic when he posted a score of 3,333,360 during the Fourth of
 July weekend at a New Hampshire arcade.
           ``This was the race to the Holy Grail,'' said Mitchell, an
 entrepreneur who runs two South Florida restaurants and markets a brand of
 hot sauce.
           No one ever had played a perfect Pac-Man game before, said
 Walter Day, chief scorekeeper for the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Score
 Board and editor of its Official Video Game and Pinball Book in Fairfield,
 Iowa. Game experts call the feat a one in 10 billion phenomenon.
           To attain Pac-Man perfection, one must navigate the yellow
 pie-shaped title character so it gobbles each and every dot, enemy blue
 ghost, energizer and fruit on the game's 256 boards.
           Mitchell accomplished the feat during a two-day quest at Funspot
 Family Entertainment Center in Weirs Beach, N.H. That's the site of the
 Twin Galaxies International Classic Video Game and Pinball Tournament each
 May.
           Starting anew each time he made a mistake, Mitchell finally
 found his groove in a game that lasted almost six hours.
           ``At about 1.9 million (points), I went off pattern,'' he said.
 ``I said to myself, `I'm losing it here. I didn't come this far to lose.'
 I started talking out loud to myself, talking my way through it. I was able
 to cheat death, so to speak. It was flawless the rest of the way.''
           Though hardly a household name, Mitchell is famous among video
 game and pinball players, whose numbers worldwide are estimated at 500
 million.
           At age 17, Mitchell set the world record in Donkey Kong, a title
 he still holds. Today, he holds the records for Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and
 Donkey Kong Jr.
prev [=] prev © 1999 Peter Langston []