I think we can all agree whether Billy Mitchell cheated or not Donkey Kong This one time is basically the most important event in all of human history and must be forensically dissected until the heat death of the universe. But in the latest round of the ongoing battle between this famous video gamer and a website that monitors world records, Mitchell now claims his doctor won’t be seeing him again.
Mitchell, famous for his reportedly world-record-breaking results in arcade cabinet games such as Pac Man and Donkey Kongwas involved in litigation with a video game social media platform/scoring authority twin galaxies. 2018 Members of the Twin Galaxies Community claimed to have evidence that his Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Records – set in 2010 – had to do with fraud. They removed his results from their website, accusing him of using the popular arcade game emulator MAME to match his records, rather than the original arcade hardware.
It had everything to do with the transition screens between levels, which emulators tend to render slightly differently. The argument against Mitchell’s claim to the throne also had to do with the lack of apparent video evidence that he performed his record-breaking runs on an actual closet, and his claimed footage of the exploits reportedly never showed up
But wait! Two years later, Guinness changed its mind, and based on “key eyewitness and expert testimony,” he reinserted his findings into the official record. So everything was fine and everyone went home and had a nice dinner. Wa it, no, sorry, the controversy just kept piling up. Twin Galaxies still refused to acknowledge his records and last year a page Mitchell had allowed to expire
This then reached a hysterical climax when Mitchell won the right to sue Twin Galaxies in October last year. He had filed a lawsuit in 2019, but Twin Galaxies responded with an anti-SLAPP motion, hoping to throw the whole thing out of court. That didn’t work and was given the go-ahead by the State of California’s Second Appellate.
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In the latest issue of Mitchell And The (Arcade) Machines, the dollar store Nick Cave provided testimony in the event as reported by his once own website. The strangest recording is Mitchell’s claim that his own doctor, who is 30, now refuses to see him because he believes he is a fraud.
“Following Twin Galaxies’ defamatory statements dated April 12, 2018,” the filed document reads, “one of the responding party’s physicians, Dr. Stanley Skopit, it to see the Respondent after the Respondent appeared for an annual inquiry.” And why? “After the responding party questioned the assistant as to why Dr. Skopit, whom the responding party had seen for over 30 years, refused to see him, the assistant informed the responding party that Dr. Skopit had read the allegations from Twin Galaxies.”
The document further alleges that as a result of social media and traditional media coverage of the allegations causing hernia and atrial fibrillation, Mitchell also suffered emotional distress “because of Twin Galaxies’ defamatory remarks.” We turned to the doctor.
I would like to embed some of this Perfect Pac-Man‘s tweets about all of this, but they are so amazingly defamatory that we would find ourselves dragged into the court case. but this thread is very entertaining, when involved in nuisance. A highlight, however, is where they draw attention to Mitchell’s justification for not submitting documents to prove his claim that he lost money because video game festivals are no longer inviting him to events. launching a spectacular scattergun approach, Lionel Hutz (I assume) begins:
The responding party refuses this request on the grounds that it does not identify the requested documents with sufficient accuracy. Responding Party further refuses this request to the extent that it requests documents already in Responding Party’s possession and/or equivalent documents if no longer available. The request incorrectly seeks information that is protected by the responding party’s constitutional right to privacy.
Then, after explaining that the documents that Twin Galaxies already have (his attorney clearly meant “Propounding Party” at one point) weren’t adequately identified and he doesn’t need to release them anyway, it kind of jumps into:
Subject to and without waiver of the foregoing objections, the Responding Party responds: After due diligence and reasonable investigation. [sic] The Responding Party cannot comply as the requested items never existed or are no longer in their possession because the Responding Party lost their relationship with these video game festivals due to the proposing party’s defamatory statements.
So I’ll try to sum it up. The documents that Twin Galaxies shouldn’t be asking for because they already have them don’t exist, and he doesn’t have any documents proving he wasn’t invited to video game festivals because he wasn’t invited to the video game festivals snatches them.
Oh my god, there’s so much more to it, but you can check it out for yourself. We’ve contacted Mitchell’s attorneys to see if he wants to respond and to see if they want to clarify anything that’s confusing my poor, tired brain here.
In the meantime, the case we all need to be fixated on, because nothing matters quite like whether a guy did reasonably well at an arcade game, continues. Nothing.
