Todd Rogers is one of the few people genuinely famous for their mastery of video games, holding numerous high-score records and scoring merchandising deals. But it turns out that at least some of his achievements are technically impossible, now that it's easy to decompile old games and look at the code. So how did he do it? [via]
More from Heather Alexandra, writing last year, when Rogers' Dragster time was first publicly challenged in a major outlet.
Rogers says that he replicated the 5.51 score multiple times in 1982: once at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show and another time at The Electronic Thing show in Detroit. “That was more than enough for the developers,” Rogers told Kotaku. “You can’t alter history, no matter who speculates what is possible and what is not.”
“Activision validated Todd’s Dragster score using the accepted methods of the day,” Crane said. “The time to question any of those records has passed.”
Alas, that's not how it works, and Rogers' times have since gotten a more thorough dismantling: Ben Heck even dismantled a real Atari machine to demonstrate their impossibility. We're at the point where the virtual referees -- websites like Twin Galaxies and Activision itself -- seem to have been grossly negligent or plainly in on it. Animating the imbroglio is a culture war, between old-timer 1980s video game records-setters and kids of the machine-assisted speedrun era.
