Has Anyone Ever Beat Pac-Man?

Pac-Man is one of the most simple yet challenging games ever produced. It appeals to all ages due to its simplicity and draws you in with how easy it looks. It even made its creator Toru Iwatani filthy rich because the concept is so simple and alluring that players become obsessed, investing weeks worth of time in attempts to reach a new high score.

Despite its simplicity, Pac-Man is almost impossible to beat. Most people don’t even pass level 3, despite ever reaching 256, the highest level you can reach before the game breaks.

Billy Mitchell Only One to Beat Pac-Man in 1999

While millions have attempted to beat the game, only one person has succeeded. The first and only relentless man who beat the game in 1999 after a five-hour session was Billy Mitchell, with a high sore of 3,333,360 points. Not only did he achieve worldwide fame, but he also surprised the creators and designers of the game, revealing what level 256 looked like with half of the right screen broken into garbled code, which meant the game was out of memory.

How Billy Mitchell Beat Pac-Man

Billy sent out a press release in 1999 with confidence, discussing his journey to become the video game champion. According to Mitchell, the game doesn’t reach maximum difficulty until board 21. It becomes incredibly tedious, yet challenging as the player must do the same thing until they reach level 255: eating the dots and blue ghosts, grabbing all the prizes and never dying. The game takes about four to five hours to beat, requiring complete focus and concentration at every second. He said in order to create perfect timing, you have to pass one corner, down to 1/60^th of a second, keeping your eye on one of the lower right hand corners of the board over 29,000 times without messing up or dying. Then finally, when you reach level 256, there is enough memory for the left half of the game before the right side becomes squirrely with computer code. When you see that, you know that you have attained a perfect score.

What Happens at the End of Pac-Man

After beating the final level, Mitchell breathed a sigh of relief, telling himself he achieved a perfect score. He also explained there’s nothing to do at the end of the last level but die. There was also nothing at the end saying “Game Over” or “The End” because the game designer (Toru Iwatani) not only believed anyone would ever beat the game, but he himself didn’t know at what level the game would end or run out of memory. The company also never even saw the split screen until Mitchell sent it to them.

Finally, the Godfather of Video Games and also the founder of Namco, Masaya Nakamura, crowned him as “Video Game Player of the Century” for this world record as well as his other achievements.

About Billy Mitchell

Billy is both a video gamer and restaurateur. He started to build his skills in pinball at the age of 16, followed by Donkey Kong, before attempting to take over Pac-Man. He specifically chose Pac-Man because it was universal; everyone knew it.

In 1982, he became motivated after hearing an eight-year-old player setting the record of 6 million points which earned him a personal congratulatory letter from President Ronald Reagan. So he worked with his friend, Chris Ayra in 1983 to determine the highest possible score on Pac-Man: 3,333,360, which required a perfect no-death run and collecting all the possible points to level 256.

Mitchell was also included in Life’s photo spread of game champions during the golden age of arcade video games in 1982. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records recognized him as the owner of the world record on Donkey Kong before he appeared in documentaries on competitive gaming and other retro video games.

In 1999, a group of Canadian players were allegedly close to reaching the theoretical high score, leading him to join the competition to reach this high score. On May 8, 1999, Rick Fothergill set the world record at the time, just 90 points short of a perfect score before July 3, the date on which Mitchell reached the perfect score in Laconia, New Hampshire, which was recorded by Funspot and Twin Galaxies. After being dubbed “Video Game Player of the Century” by Namco in the Japan Tokyo Game Show that year, he returned in November 1999 and offered $100,000 to the first person who could pass the split-screen level, which was never reached.

In 2007, a documentary was released, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, on his attempts to maintain his high score on Donkey Kong after he was challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe (you’ll have to watch it to see if he still holds the record).

Today, Mitchell’s family owns the Rickey’s restaurants in Hollywood, FL and Pembroke, FL, where he also sells Rickey’s World Famous Hot Sauce.

Discrepancies in Mitchell’s High Score Videos of Donkey Kong

In 2018, Michell’s high score were challenged after Twin Galaxies forums found discrepancies in the video he provided for The King of Kong, alleging that he had used emulation software to cheat. But after a long investigation, Twin Galaxies concluded that Mitchell invalidated all of his scores due to Galaxies’ zero-tolerance policy for dishonesty. Guinness also stripped Mitchell of the records. But after some legal threats against the two parties, Guinness reinstated his records, but Twin Galaxies did not, which led to Mitchell filing for defamation lawsuits against Twin Galaxies and others in 2020.

What Memories Do You Have of Pac-Man?

What’s the furthest level you’ve ever beaten in Pac-Man? Did you challenge your friends? Did you play on the big arcade game or another gaming device? Any fun childhood memories you have from Pac-Man? We’d love to hear it about in the comments below!