Retro Survival
High Score: Dodges barrels to explain the mysteries behind the Donkey Kong world records
A High Score interview of Steve Wiebe, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Champion
BY: PAUL DRURY
When you're going for a World Record, concentration is the key. You need the ability to totally focus on the game in hand and exclude everything else, no matter how distracting.
"My little boy Derek was crying and pestering me that he needed his potty," explains loving father Steve Wiebe. "But I was on 600k with my first guy and was in the middle of this great game! I knew I could do something big and I wasn't going to let him mess it up."
Derek was in the middle of something big too. He messed his nappy. But whilst Steve might not be scored highly for his parenting skills that day, his Donkey Kong score of 985,000 was indeed a new World Record. He's since improved on that by a further 600 points, on June 3rd 2005 at this year's Funspot Tournament, his game lasting over two hours and witnessed by an audience of sixty cheering supporters. He describes it as "a natural high", but scores like that aren't built in a day and Steve's relationship with a chubby Italian carpenter known only as Jumpman (before he changed his name to Mario and his profession to plumbing), goes way back.
"I'd played Space Invaders and Asteroids, sure, but I was never really into shooting games. Donkey Kong was the first game I fell in love with - the cool graphics, the variety of screens and the whole concept of dodging, jumping and climbing instead of shooting really grabbed me."
Steve spent much of his childhood in Bellevue, Washington,
USA in various pizza joints, playing Nintendo's first big arcade hit and
amassing respectable scores of several hundred thousand. In the late
eighties, he headed off to Washington University and found a Donkey Kong
cabinet installed in his fraternity house. In between Toga parties and
studying for a Mechanical Engineering Degree, he pushed his score ever
upward, helped by a frat brother who explained how to negotiate the tricky
third elevator screen. He got his own machine in 1990 and by the summer of
'91, Donkey Kong was almost a full-time job. |
"I was only taking one class and spent the rest of the day
playing Donkey Kong. I'd have the TV on top of the machine so I could
watch sports in between screens."
By the end of that fall, Steve had reached a high of 967,000, which would have qualified as a World Record, if he'd been aware of Twin Galaxies and their official role as keepers of videogame high scores. Steve had reached something else as well. "The killscreen! I was bewildered. All of a sudden, I died. I just couldn't understand it - I just tumbled and died. Had I missed a barrel? Maybe the game's gone to a new difficulty level and there are invisible barrels?!" Ah, the infamous killscreen. At the beginning of level 22, (the 31st barrel screen), the bonus displayed on screen flicks erratically through various numbers, then stops all together and seven seconds later, the hapless Jumpman is performing his somersaulting death throes. Despite numerous myths about ways to avoid an early game over, it's a bug and it's insurmountable. |
Yet, rather than cursing Miyamoto's coding, Steve realized it presented an interesting situation. If you knew when the game was going to end, you could look back and work out how to maximize your score on each preceding level. So Steve built up an impressive range of additional strategies - he's dubbed it "point pressing" - with a high risk and reward ethos. Thus he's concluded from extensive fieldwork, that it's always worth getting the hammers on the barrel screen, collecting all the prize items on the elevator screen more than makes up for the lost time bonus and if you can perfect the art of jumping away from fireballs, you can trick the machine into giving you vital extra points. Most crucially, if you can reach the rivets level immediately preceding the killscreen with all your lives intact, you can add thousands to your score, without actually completing the screen and then repeating till your game ends naturally.
With such an array of tactics, we wonder whether it's possible to break that magical million mark? 'It is and I have,' sighs Steve, and proceeds to tell us the long and twisting tale of why his seven figured score remains unofficial. Here's the abridged account.
In the middle of 2003, Steve submits a taped Donkey Kong score of 947,200 to Twin Galaxies. It's verified as the new World Record within a week and something of a media frenzy follows, with local papers and talk shows giving Steve his deserved fifteen minutes. Then someone at TG spots that the record had been achieved on a "double DK" board (ie. the board can play both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.) and whilst the changes from the original appear tiny and cosmetic - a few of the sounds and colors are a little different from the original - the whole validity of Steve's scores come in to question. TG conduct lengthy time and motion studies on the gameplay, there's talk of reclassifying his records and he even returns from work one day to find two uninvited TG representatives in his garage examining his machine.
"I just thought that was rude," says Steve. "But then they saw a parcel I'd received from Roy Shildt's and as soon as they saw his name, it was like everything was tainted, like I was trying to cheat."
Old Retro Gamer readers may be aware of Roy from issue 16.
He's the Missile Command tournament record holder and has launched a
one-man nuclear assault on all things associated with his nemesis Billy
Mitchell, who not only heads up Twin Galaxies, but also happens to be the
existing Donkey Kong champion. Roy helps Steve buy an original DK board
for perhaps not entirely altruistic reasons, keen to see Billy taken down
a rivet or two. Steve starts sending in tapes of ever increasing scores,
yet all remain unverified.
"It just seemed a bit dubious because my tapes were being reviewed by one of Billy's friends, Chris Ayra, and I felt they were maybe stalling to give Billy chance to break one million first. He's a great player in his own right, but I guess he wants to outshine everyone and post an awesome score. I was, like, being a thorn in his side." |
Steve does indeed get that awesome score - 1,006,600 taped
on July 4th 2004. However, Billy then phones to say he's got 1,014,000,
though sadly not on tape, and TG plan to announce that the two master
players broke the million-point barrier "simultaneously".
"I raised the issue that someone had to have done it first, and after that, they just seemed intent on disqualifying my scores. They've never verified my million plus score over a year later and I just think it's because Billy is my competition. Maybe I put egg on their face," wonders Steve, with a quiet resignation. NB. The screen to your right is from Billy Mitchell's current hiscore video tape which breaks one million. Though Steve IS credited at this moment with the hiscore for the game on the TG website. |
Relations between Steve and TG haven't been helped by Roy's involvement ("he's been very supportive to me, but he is kind of obsessive - the 7am phone calls are starting to get less though now") and Steve, a softly spoken Junior High School Teacher, feels caught in the middle of videogaming's equivalent of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"I'd just like to break the million in public to end the
controversy. I was thinking of coming to CGEUK and playing Billy there,
but my wife's not keen on me going all the way to London to play a
videogame. She's a big fan of the royal family though. You'll buy me a
beer? Oh thanks man, I'm there."
As happy when Mario is the villain rather than the hero, Steve also holds the high score on Donkey Kong Jr. with a cool 1,004,000. "It's a great game in its own right and I love it too, but it doesn't quite have the magic of Donkey Kong. Billy's told me on the phone he has a score of 1.2m, but he doesn't seem keen to hand the tape in." Interestingly, DK Jr. also suffers from a killscreen that appears on Level E. Are there any clever hackers out there who can explain the cause of the bugs that plague both games? Steve would love to hear from you. |