Billy Mitchell, once regarded as one of the greatest video game record holders on Earth, seems set to lose his cases vs Twin Galaxies, after he is caught doing multiple perjuries.
This is a continuation of a story that has been going on for years, so we will have to sum things up quickly here to catch you up to recent events.
Billy is one of a group of gamers, who allegedly cheated in earning world records for video games, and were subsequently removed from those records and scoreboards.
Billy Mitchell decided to sue one of those world recordkeeping organizations, Twin Galaxies, for defamation in 2019. Subsequently, Twin Galaxies countersued Billy for fraud.
The two Billy Mitchell vs Twin Galaxies cases revolve around a Donkey Kong speedrun record that Billy Mitchell claims he earned in a Mortgage Broker’s Convention in 2019. Billy was caught lying in his depositions, when several other witnesses in the trial disputed his testimonies.
In one such deposition, Billy claimed that a Gamestop manager entered the original Donkey Kong circuit board into the arcade cabinet he played. He also claims that Gamestop manager was there to serve as witness for his world record, and that the manager also set up the recording equipment.
To be eligible for Twin Galaxies’ records, the gameplay had to be recorded on a VCR, which required that a VCR be connected to the arcade machine using a compatible video converter.
The Gamestop manager’s testimony, however, revealed that he did not insert the circuit board into the cabinet. He also did not set up any VCR or video converter. Under repeated questioning, the manager insisted that there was not even any cable connected to the cabinet for recording.
This last detail was important, because it meant that the gameplay Billy sent to Twin Galaxies was not what he played on the convention.
Billy also claimed that he set the world record after playing for a number of hours, starting either at 9 or 10 in the morning and ending somewhere between 1 or 2 PM. The gameplay video he sent to Twin Galaxies was over 2 hours and 30 minutes long.
However, the second witness, Mortgage Brokers Chair Valerie Saunders, also disputes this claim in her testimony.
Valerie did not see the record being broken firsthand. However, she recalls that she was notified that Billy had broken the record ten to fifteen minutes after the convention had started. This, once again, aside from being a plain old perjury, raises questions about the validity of the gameplay Billy sent to Twin Galaxies.
Unlike the Microsoft Activision lawsuit sent to District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in California, it isn’t likely that these lawsuits between Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies will be resolved anytime soon. However, this evidence does not reflect well on Billy’s case, and it seems that it could help Twin Galaxies’ countersuit.
It may be the situation, given how this case has played out so far, that Billy will eventually lose, given that he hasn’t put a strong case at all. While we wait and see how it plays out, you can watch Karl Jobst’s more detailed recap of these developments in his video below.
