Jon had read about a certain Billy Mitchell who in July 1999 achieved the impossible – a perfect game of Pac-Man.
“I knew the game pretty well, but there was still more to do. “It was unfinished business” explains Jon. He buys it and decides to restore it to its former glory with intent to start playing again.
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Jon’s local arcade Las Vegas closed down and he got some qualifications and started his adult life.įast-forward 25 years and through a series of weird coincidences (long story for another time) Jon discovers an old Pac-Man cabaret cabinet in a barn. Pac-Man was sent to the dump along with his arcade relatives QBert, DigDug and Mappy. Because shortly afterwards, everything went away.Įveryone stopped going to the arcades. The score submitted should have got Jon to the UK arcade game championships back then, but Pac-Man was already seen as too out of date to be included so it went nowhere.īut it was moot. They printed the score, and amazingly, what we now know is that had we over here in England known about Twin Galaxies, the self-proclaimed custodian and officiator of arcade high scores on the other side of the Atlantic, his score of 3,221,000 would have been the officially verified Pac-Man world record at the time, beating the highest recorded score up to that point of 3,191,000 achieved by Tim Balderramos. Decent enough to get it verified by the owner of the arcade and submitted to the esteemed UK magazine “Computer & Videogames”.
In 1983, Jon Stoodley from the UK, got to the end of the game – level 256 where it craps out. So, do those three things, and six hours or so later, you get your perfect score of 3,333,360.īut what many people don’t appreciate, is that whilst anyone can get a perfect game of Pac-Man – all the patterns are out there on YouTube if you can be bothered to learn them – not everyone can actually play the game to the point where you can manipulate the ghosts at will and put them where you need them to be in order to max out the game. You eat what you can, then kill off Pac-Man, and do it again with your remaining lives. There are dots there, but some are hidden in the mess on the right hand side. In short, the garbage displayed on the screen means that there aren’t enough dots to eat for the game to register that the level is complete. The game literally “crashes” due to eight-bit coding and an expectation from the Japanese creator, Iwatani-san, that no one would ever get there anyway. Every dot, every powerpill, every ghost, every fruit. (Bear in mind that in order to get a perfect score, you have to arrive at this point on your first man. You are the loneliest gamer in the world at this point – no one can help you, you are fighting your own mind – if it wonders, you’re in trouble.Īnd then of course, finally, the infamous “split screen” at screen 256. You have to get a pattern in your head, learn it, and execute it 235 times over and over and over. The powerpills don’t work and the ghosts cannot be eaten. What follows from screen 21, are 235 boards of the same thing. In some instances you have one second to eat all four ghosts. These screens vary in speed, and also vary in terms of how long the ghosts turn blue. Since then, six other players have attained the maximum score in increasingly faster times.įrom my perspective, there’s three stages to achieving a perfect game:ĭuring the first 20 boards, you eat dots and powerpills, and the ghosts turn blue and you can eat them, along with all the other dots and fruit. The first person to achieve this score was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours. Here’s how Wikipedia describes a perfect game of Pac-Man:Ī perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels (by eating every possible dot, power pellet, fruit, and enemy) without losing a single life, and using all extra lives to score as many points as possible on Level 256. After some 32 years in the making, UK player Jon Stoodley achieved a live perfect score on Pac-Man on August 22nd 2015.
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