Nerd Defends America's honor!
By Blackestnight 2 Comments
From cracked.com
Every now and then you hear about some mega man who does a marathon a day for half a year, or a bionic lady who freakin' swims an ocean. Well, this list isn't about those kind of people.
If you've ever sunk way too much time into completing a video game, or grinding for a particular item in World of Warcraft, you can at least feel better about yourself (or worse, depending on your level of addiction) for not being this guy. Billy Mitchell, known for being the "King of Kong," is also the first person to ever get the highest possible score in Pac-Man, at 3,333,360 points, handily beating our score of "fuck these fucking ghosts, I quit."
Mitchell set the record on July 3, 1999, after coming out of a 14-year retirement so he could focus on things like college and girls. In order to get this perfect score, he had to eat every pellet, fruit and blue ghost on the screen for every level. All two-hundred fifty-six of them.
Mitchell described the task as "tremendously monotonous," which sounds about right to us, since after you complete level 20, you're playing the exact same level over 200 times in a row. Four hours into his attempt, which is about three hours after we would have broken down crying and screaming for mercy, he "realized I still had 100 boards to go," at which point his soul probably curled up and died, Pac-Man-style
So why did Mitchell come out of retirement and spend hundreds of torturous, monotonous hours chasing this obscure milestone? Was there a monetary reward, or perhaps the promise of fame outside of the realm of video game nerds? No, it was for America. A group of Canadians started going for the perfect score in 1998, and the apparently all-American Mitchell would have none of it. He quickly took to the arcade in order to "put [the Canadians] in their place." A place where they... don't spend as much time playing Pac-Man? Go visit them there, Billy.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18647_7-amazing-yet-uninspiring-feats-human-endurance.html#ixzz0v7RLxzVw
WOW Way to go Mitchell. I once scored over 1,100,000 while on a date, she'd gone through the whole arcade, and I was still on my one game, I had to die on purpose to leave with her. It was worth it at the time, but now I wonder what could have been.
