Billy Mitchell
Golden Age Gamer
Class of 2010 Inductee
William James Mitchell Jr. is a video game player and businessman.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was recognized for numerous records on classic video games.
Mitchell has also appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming.
In 1982, Mitchell was featured in a photo spread in Life along with other video game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games.
In 1999, Mitchell said he was the first person to attain a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the arcade game Pac-Man.
A 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, follows his attempts to maintain the highest score on Donkey Kong after being challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe.
Mitchell’s family owns the Rickey’s restaurants in Hollywood, Florida, and Pembroke Pines, Florida, and he sells Rickey’s World Famous Hot Sauce.
Wikipedia Link:
Notable scores:
In 1982, Mitchell set a record on Donkey Kong with 874,300 points.
In 1984, he set a record score for BurgerTime of 7,881,050, which stood until 2005.
In January 1985, he set a new record score for Ms. Pac-Man of 703,560, which stood until it was surpassed in 2001 by Chris Ayra.
He set a record score for Donkey Kong Jr. of 957,300 in 2004.
He said he recaptured the world records for both Donkey Kong (1,062,800 points) and Donkey Kong Jr. (1,270,900) on the weekend of July 24, 2010. By September 2010, both these records were surpassed.
In popular culture:
High Score, a 2011 episode of Regular Show, features Garrett Bobby Ferguson, a parody of Mitchell.
Eddie “The Fireblaster” Plant, a character from the 2015 film Pixels, was partially inspired by Mitchell.
International Video Game Hall of Fame Class of 2010 Induction Speech:
