Dragster record being questioned

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scotland
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Dragster record being questioned

Postby scotland » July 8th, 2017, 11:11 pm

http://kotaku.com/doubt-and-drama-still-haunt-an-old-seemingly-impossibl-1796714894

Activisions 1980 game, Dragster, by David Crane, has had a record of just 5.51 seconds, set way back in 1982. The record has never been beaten. With speedrunning a big thing, a speedrunner has parsed the code and cried bull on the record. On the record holders side are David Crane, a mention in an Activision magazine, all the unknowns with real hardware, and lots of time gone by, on the speedrunners side is that the record holder seems to be have fibbed on these records before, and an analysis of the code.

Sut
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby Sut » July 9th, 2017, 3:07 pm

How did they confirm these 'records' back in the day ?

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scotland
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby scotland » July 9th, 2017, 5:10 pm

Sut wrote:How did they confirm these 'records' back in the day ?


According to record holder and David Crane, 'with the methods of the day'. It really doesn't seem like Activision or Crane really cared about authenticated anything back in the day, or at least no one thought it worth documenting. There should have been originally been a polaroid of the screen and time, but no one has that anymore.

Sut
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby Sut » July 10th, 2017, 2:24 am

It's a good read.
I was going to side with Todd as maybe the real hardware has slight variances to the gameplay that a simulation wouldn't pick up.

However I then read the part where Todd's scores are insurmountable on other Atari games and the point difference being totally unrealistic. Seems to be a bit of 'King of Kong' in Todd's submissions.

"including an alleged 15 million-point score in 2600 Donkey Kong. (The current record is 1,472,100.) Many of Twin Galaxies’ officially recognized records credited to Rogers are hundreds of thousands or even millions of points higher than the second-place score. Some of them are perfect round numbers that are several orders of magnitude greater than any score with video evidence. Rogers is officially credited with a score of 65,000,000 points on Centipede for Atari 5200; the second-place score is 58,078."

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MoarRipter
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby MoarRipter » July 10th, 2017, 4:20 pm

They could put an * next to his record.

rockofhysteria
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby rockofhysteria » July 10th, 2017, 4:32 pm

Good read there. My thing on Video Game records especially classic gaming has been. If it's authenticated and recognized by Walter Day at Twin Galaxies then I believe it.

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Retro STrife
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby Retro STrife » July 10th, 2017, 5:49 pm

I once saw a video about how Walter Day and Twin Galaxies verify records for their official records. (I believe it was in the "King of Kong" documentary). Basically they had a ton of video tapes sent in from all over the country that they had to go through to verify each record. But I guess a tape could be altered if someone was crafty enough. And this was in the 2000s... who knows what was done in the 80s..maybe a photo of the screen was good enough.

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scotland
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby scotland » July 10th, 2017, 6:30 pm

Retro STrife wrote:.. who knows what was done in the 80s..maybe a photo of the screen was good enough.


Not saying this was done, but even in 1982 we were making fake photo IDs and there were probably lots of things you could if you were in the high school film club. Film trickery has been in use at least since those two girls made photos of fairies in their garden back in Cottingley 100 years ago.

You could possibly recreate the Dragster screen pixel by pixel on a tv using a home computer like the C64, which came out in 1982, at least good enough for it to look okay on a Polaroid picture.

goldenband
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Re: Dragster record being questioned

Postby goldenband » July 10th, 2017, 11:24 pm

Sut wrote:Rogers is officially credited with a score of 65,000,000 points on Centipede for Atari 5200; the second-place score is 58,078."

See, now that I could attribute to sloppy record-keeping if his real high score was 65K, since it's easy to imagine how an extra three digits could get added by someone who doesn't know the game or is otherwise not paying attention.

If the Dragster record isn't a fabrication, then at this point I tend to think it was caused by some sort of hardware fault or other glitch. The whole thing feels a bit metaphysical to me: under what circumstances could the program code itself behave in an unpredictable manner? Under what circumstances could a hardware failure alter it and yield a lower time?

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scotland
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Re: Dragster record taken away

Postby scotland » January 30th, 2018, 9:13 am

Twin Galaxies has thrown out the 5.51 Dragster record as technically impossible and thrown out all of Todd Rogers records. All of them, and banned him from even trying to set records again. A tweet from Twin Galaxies called it damning information.

Some of that evidence is the analysis that 5.51 is just not technically possible. Rogers disputes that analysis by Koziel, a computer engineer, Dragster is a pretty small amount of code, and Koziel pointed out there is just one bit of code checking for shifting. It's binary - yes or no, and not nuanced in any way.

David Crane though, who wrote the game, defended Rogers up to last week. His view is that the score was judged good at the time, end of discussion. However, whatever evidence Activision used to authenticate Rogers score, if there ever was any, is lost. Game over.

Twin Galaxies has notified Chinese World Records, so expect those to be removed as well.


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