Pac Man Jesus

Uber-blog Instapundit had a link this weekend to a story about Billy Mitchell, the man who played the first ever "perfect game" in Pac-Man. (A perfect game requires eating every pellet and ghost and bonus item on all 256 boards without losing a life. The 256th board involves a split screen, as if the game suddenly lost its horizontal hold.)

Despite the Instapundit imprimatur, I say skip that story and read this marvelous one from Oxford American about the man and his feat.

Mitchell is a very intriguing character. In some ways, he’s the kind of guy you would think of when you hear "video game record holder," and in a lot of ways he isn’t. My favorite tidbit from the OA story is when Mitchell goes to Japan to meet the game’s developers:

Mitchell had all sorts of questions for them about the intricacies of the game, but he quickly discovered that they had far more questions for him. He knew and understood the game better than its fathers. "I had to explain the personalities of the ghosts," he remembers. "They had no idea. They just ran programs and they don’t always know how it will fall together." He asked about the split screen and they had no clue. They never thought a score like that was possible. "I told them that my theory was that the game just runs out of memory at that point," Mitchell says. "They just shrugged their shoulders."

"People will say, ’Look at you, you think you know more than the guy who made the game,’" he says. "I say, ’Yeah, I do, he told me so.’"

Anyway, the OA story is a lot of fun and very well-written, like most of that magazine’s contents. Check it out and then consider subscribing.