Billy Mitchell (gamer)

William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was recognized for numerous records on classic video games before disputes arose over their legitimacy beginning in 2018. 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. In 2018, Mitchell's high scores on Donkey Kong were contested after members of the Twin Galaxies forums found discrepancies in the videos Mitchell had provided for The King of Kong, suggesting he had used emulation software to falsify his score. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records, which incorporated Twin Galaxies' scores into their records, removed Mitchell's scores based on this evidence. Mitchell then sued both organizations for defamation. While Guinness restored Mitchell's scores, Twin Galaxies countersued Mitchell. Both Mitchell and Twin Galaxies settled in 2024, and Twin Galaxies posted Mitchell's scores on a newly created historical leaderboard, which is not part of the current scoring records. Mitchell remains banned from Twin Galaxies competitions. Mitchell's family owns the Rickey's restaurants in Hollywood, Florida, and Pembroke Pines, Florida, and he sells Rickey's World Famous Hot Sauce.