After several years in legal battles between Billy Mitchell against Twin Galaxies for the infamous defamation lawsuit has finally come to a close on January 16th, 2024, as the involved parties have reached a private settlement to finalize the lawsuit.

Billy Mitchell is a widely known character in the professional gaming community for his then records of famous arcade games, like Donkey Kong and Pacman. Since then, his original records have been heavily questioned by the community, hinting at plausible fraud in the videotapes Mitchell submitted back then to achieve his records, with comparison videos and analysis given between his videos and how MAME loaded levels for the games he achieved records at, essentially claiming he cheated to achieve them.

Given the whole ordeal, Billy Mitchell started throwing defamation lawsuits to those claiming he cheated to get his records, and the one of those lawsuits was against the authoritative body that documents achievements and records in gaming since 1981, Twin Galaxies. Mitchell's defamation lawsuit came after Twin Galaxies decided to remove Mitchell's records from their databases back in 2018. Mitchell officially filed for the defamation lawsuit in 2019 in the state of California.

Since then, both parties have been involved in a legal war, and it wasn't until January 16th, 2024, that the case came to a close with a private settlement set between the two involved parties to officially end the lawsuit, after the expert opinion of Dr. Michael Zyda, who gave his full opinion and is currently available for public viewing.

Twin Galaxies released a statement on their official website regarding the private settlement, detailing a summary of how the whole ordeal came to be, and how it ended given the settlement that just took place. While the statement is somewhat lengthy, one of the most important paragraphs out of the statement is the following:

In fair consideration of the expert opinion provided by Dr. Zyda on behalf of Mr. Mitchell, and consistent with Twin Galaxies' dedication to the meticulous documentation and preservation of video game score history, Twin Galaxies shall heretofore reinstate all of Mr. Mitchell’s scores as part of the official historical database on Twin Galaxies’ website.

Dr. Zyda's opinion can basically be summed up to hardware failures, degradation, quality loss and/or non-maintenance of either the arcade cabinets Mitchell used to achieve the records, or the hardware used to fabricate or distribute the videotapes.

Just as Twin Galaxies released their statement, Billy Mitchel also released his own statement on his X account (currently locked to followers only) regarding the private settlement, where he mentions the following:

Twin Galaxies has reinstated all of my world records from my videogame career. Here's my statement:

As for the legal parties involved, in an interview with Arstechnica, Twin Galaxies' lawyer David Tashroudian goes into some details about the private settlement, with the possibility of the settlement being made to avoid both a long term legal action, and most of all, avoid large expenses:

A ton of cases end up settling prior to trial, just to avoid the expense and for all the parties to get finality and certainty on their own terms, there were going to be an inordinate amount of costs involved, and both parties were facing a lot of uncertainty at trial, and they wanted to get the matter settled on their own terms without putting it to a jury.

Tashroudian additionally mentions that Twin Galaxies had almost everything ready for a potential upcoming trial against Billy Mitchell, including evidence questioning Mitchell's witnesses and experts, as well as photo evidence of Mitchell in score events with arcade cabinets that had modified joysticks, which invalidates any record from being registered due to the hardware being modified.

---

What does this mean at the end of the day?
Were Billy Mitchell's scores reinstated after all?

While Billy Mitchell's previous records have been restored to Twin Galaxies' historical database, this doesn't mean that Mitchell's original scores (which were the ones being brought into question) were reinstated. Only the historical database showcases Mitchell's records for archival purposes, but not the current main records by Twin Galaxies, meaning that Billy Mitchell's records are not going to be reinstated to the official main world records, and Billy Mitchell still remains banned from Twin Galaxies competition as well.

In an email response by Twin Galaxies, they answer the following questions to clear out any doubts about the settlement of the case:

Twin Galaxies' Statement
Billy Mitchell's Statement
Twin Galaxies Historical Database

 

[Spider_Man]

Then comes nintendo to recover his goods, check if the rom file he used to emulate is of the original game he owns and not illegally downloaded from the web.

Then sues him for piracy.

Naa, I know nintendo find any excuse to sue folks these days, but that's probably too far fetched.

Id still say the same, high scores should only count if played on its original hardware and not emulated.

Emulators can give better performance than the original hardware which then can give an advantage to the player.

But surely there's more to life than bitching for years in court over some fucking High score.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

Id still say the same, high scores should only count if played on its original hardware and not emulated.

Or they should be categorized separately.

 

[J-Machine]

the settlement should have been telling mitchel to pound sand imo

 

[Lostbhoy]

Soooo... Does he have to pay legal fees or does he get paid.. and is it in quarters???

I wonder if I can sue my friends who said I cheated when I beat their high scores... Meh, I didn't care then and I don't care now.

This all seems overly drawn out for some games that basically don't exist anymore. He won't be showing on any of my roms so will his score now be injected to every rom? Is there a homebrew for that??

 

[m_babble]

Dude is unending drama.

 

[TheZander]

Really sad to see this. Billy mitchell was a hero to me. I never knew about this case or that his scores were fraudulent. One year i saw him on 3 separate occasions. Waited in line each time. Bought so many headshots and bottles of hot sauce that i don't even like. I feel like I've been duped. I don't know what to believe in anymore. Everything ive ever held sacred is built on a lie.

 

[CoolKid575]

This sucks, Billy basically got everything he wanted! Luckily he still has that lawsuit with Karl Jobst to deal with.