Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong high-score case will move forward to trial

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell competes at a (presumably authentic) Donkey Kong cabinet. (credit: Flickr / daveynin)

A Los Angeles County judge has ruled that Billy Mitchell has met the "minimal merit" standard necessary to move forward to trial in his defamation case against the high-score adjudicators at the Twin Galaxies organization. But the ruling doesn't specifically weigh in on the conflicting evidence presented so far, and it suggests that both sides have some chance of prevailing at trial.

The defamation case, which Ars was the first to publicly report on in May, centers on Twin Galaxies' 2018 decision to invalidate all of Mitchell's high scores. That decision came after Twin Galaxies reviewed video evidence that suggests at least two of Mitchell's submitted Donkey Kong scores were not performed on an original arcade PCB, as required by the organization's rules.

Mitchell says in court documents that Twin Galaxies' statement on the matter falsely and libelously implied that he was a cheater and that the organization's investigation ignored testimony from numerous eyewitnesses to his performance. Mitchell argues that Twin Galaxies' case "essentially rests on a conspiracy nearly as broad (and untenable) as the Kennedy assassination: Scores of people around the country with seemingly no connection to each other have agreed to lie and fabricate evidence that Mitchell achieved his records on arcade software."

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