It's only a few days into the new year, and the long-awaited 2009 Nibbler Championship is here! Nibbler, for those who don't recall, was an arcade game made by the jukebox company Rock-Ola in the early 1980s. Nibbler is mostly forgotten other than it’s historical appeal as the sole arcade machine whose counter had enough digits to display 999,999,999 and therefore turn over at 000,000,000, or one billion points.
The game itself sucked—“playing the thing is joyless,” says Dwayne Richard, the number two Nibbler contender of all time—but as the highest of all potential scores, the “billion on Nibbler” was a universal goal in the early 80s. To do so would require playing for two days straight -- standing, alert, at the machine for 40+ hours. Many tried and failed. Tom Asaki from Montana, who was the first person to analytically dissect Ms. Pac Man and later became a physicist at Los Alamos, made several Nibbler billion attempts at Walter Day's arcade, Twin Galaxies, in Ottumwa, Iowa. On one occasion his elbows got so inflamed and sore he rested them in two buckets of ice while still playing. On January 15, 1984, Tim McVey from Oskaloosa came to Walter’s arcade and finally reached a billion after playing forty-four hours—except that instead of turning over to zeros, the counter kept going. Tim gave up at 1,000,042,270 when he realized the true milestone was ten billion points, another order of magnitude away, and sadly, well out of reach for him and all humanity.
McVey's achievement was recognized by the Mayor of Ottumwa, who designated January 28, 1984 as "Tim McVey Day," which was commemorated by this awesome poster:
Rock-Ola officials were there to award McVey with a Nibbler machine of his very own. Of course, having faced down Nibbler, McVey didn't want to touch the thing and he sold it—to Walter's rival arcade proprietor, down the street! McVey's take: two hundred dollars. In tokens.
So: that's all historical background for what is happening right now, at this moment, and can be viewed streaming. Tim McVey is back, trying to break his own record. Only this time, he's going head to head against Dwayne Richard, known in competitive classic video game circles as the greatest generalist player, capable of scoring at the drop of a hat on hundreds of titles, including Nibbler, where he holds the second highest score.
They started yesterday morning and, if all goes well, they have about another full day. The feed is split into quadrants: both Nibbler screens below, and scores above. Dwayne's side is identified by the red maple leaf (he's Canadian). As with Billy Mitchell's Pac Man pursuit, this challenge is international.
Dwayne is a friend of mine, so I'm rooting for him. He makes a significant appearance in my Harper's story on Billy Mitchell and the metaphysics of Ms. Pac Man. (Dwayne's the one often waxing philosophically.) In there is mentioned that Dwayne has been hoping to take another shot at the billion, so fingers crossed.
***UPDATE: Dwayne's machine froze at roughly half a billion points. Alas, his quest continues.
***UPDATE 2: Tim lost control somewhere past 600,000,000, so neither man set a record. When Tim crapped out, however, Dwayne decided to start a new game, just to see if he could beat Tim's score in this competition. This will set no new records, not even his own. And after playing for 24 hours straight, he started over, at zero, and headed into another 24-hour stretch. How's that for bad-ass?
Now, as for the nagging question: why anyone would do any of this? As Walter says, the Nibbler billion, like the moon, or Everest, is a fundamental human challenge. You go because it's there. Along the way, there is something to be learned. Walter's a spiritual dude. And that goes for all things, including Nibbler. In the first version of my Harper's story, I wrote a different lede, one that began with a similarly intense marathon, pitting humankind against the Star Wars machine. Robert Mruczek, who viewers of King of Kong will know as the very earnest and serious chief referee at Twin Galaxies, set the record on Star Wars twenty four years ago. It was an epic moment, and here it is, recounted:
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency
— Alan Turing
It was snowing in Manhattan when Robert Mruczek walked into the glowing warmth of Fascination Arcade at 48th and Broadway with the intention of making history. He didn’t get any change, because one quarter was all he needed and he’d brought one with him. There, not far from the door, stood a Star Wars machine. It was January, 1984, and the Star Wars game was an arcade favorit, recreating the space-borne dog fighting from the George Lucas films in hypnotically simple and gently pulsating green vectors. As fate would have it, the game was empty as Robert approached and readied himself with some deep breaths and silence. He put in his quarter, pressed the red button: PLAYER ONE START, gripped the yoke, and settled into Wave 1. Two days later, he stumbled away from the console in a daze with 321,200,000 points, a staggeringly high score that even his friends, John and Lou, might not have believed had they not witnessed it with their own eyes.
Robert wasn’t surprised at the outcome. He’d prepared for months, taking vitamins, lifting free weights for added arm strength, and staying awake for days in order to gauge his performance under significant sleep deprivation. “When you play a marathon on most games, you can build up hundreds of extra lives,” Robert later explained, “giving you some breathing room. But Star Wars is unforgiving. Six shields, that’s it. You can’t leave the controls for more than fifteen seconds.” He’d altered his diet so as to reduce metabolism and not need the facilities. During the game itself, he drank only weak tea with lemon — an intake of “minimal hydration” that did not require urination, according to Robert, because he has the anatomical advantage of being blessed with three kidneys. For nutrients, he chewed, but did not swallow, a few green peppers and shredded carrots. Alongside him, John and Lou were ad hoc aides-de-camp; mostly present for moral support and witness bearers, they would also help, when necessary, with the tea and other preparations: extra glasses, a small towel, and wipes for Robert’s forehead and hands. Robert prefers to play standing, rather than seated on a stool or a chair on in the more leisurely cockpit version of the game, so he stood, and that meant his legs cramped within a few hours. Despite shoes purposefully chosen for comfort, his feet filled with lactic acid and swelled painfully.
Tribulations notwithstanding, Robert’s game unfolded as the best ever recorded. As recently as May of 2005, an Oregonian named Brandon Ericson came close to beating Robert’s record, but reported that late in the second day, his performance deteriorated as his eyes filled with hallucinations and his mind confused itself with waking dream associations, like a “persistent belief that the towers on the surface of the Death Star were people, or residences, and that the fireballs they fired at me were speech or some other communication intended for me.”
During Robert’s definitive game, he remained calm and his facilities lucid to the end. “When you’re really on,” he said, “everything runs on instinct, as if it’s just happening. A million points goes by and you can’t remember it. At one point, I found myself in a 45-minute stretch of flawlessness. I took no hits. It was coming natural. Very, very unusual.” There was one trouble patch — somewhere near 4am, at hour 17, he was surprised on a trench wave and dropped to zero shields, a situation he likens to “being six behind at hole 15 of the PGA Masters,” i.e. “S.O.L.” — yet Robert’s concentration only deepened, as he stabilized, built himself back up to full shields and headed for an uncharted scoring horizon. “Something clicked,” he said. “It was the greatest moment of focus in my life.”
Robert collected his paperwork — Star Wars’ scoring system is limited six digits, so he’d asked “arcade technicians” to stand by and record all three hundred instances where he rolled over a million — and sent it to Walter Day, Chief Referee and Founder of Twin Galaxies, the official regulatory body for classic video game competition.
Since 1981, Walter has officiated at hundreds of video game events, wearing a referee shirt, carrying a clipboard, and, quite often, a whistle. The self-described scribe of the discipline, Walter has spent the last quarter century maintaining detailed records of countless gaming accomplishments, many of which he compiled into a 984-page tome for reference purposes a few years back. (A new edition, due out soon in three volumes, will be more than twice as long.) Walter’s institutional presence puts him at the center of the small, but extremely dedicated circuit of classic video game competition. Technology marches on, but there still exists a cohort of people who take words like Donkey Kong extremely seriously. No hint of irony or nostalgia chic inflects their constant online conversation at the Twin Galaxies website and other forums, wherein so many questions, postulates, theses, and inordinately lengthy treatises on this or that game or strategy are discussed with the utter solemnity of a peer-reviewed journal like Physical Review C. At home, many players own several of their favorite games; these are necessary for practice, as they prepare to compete in person at several annual tournaments, the largest of which takes place each June at the Fun Spot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire.
Walter’s operates Twin Galaxies out of his home in Fairfield, Iowa. In addition to serving as the seat of authorized video game scorekeeping, Fairfield is also the worldwide headquarters of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation movement. Walter’s been a follower of TM, as it’s known among members, almost since the Maharishi first bewitched George Harrison and the Beatles with his non-denominational distillation of eastern philosophy and physical purification rituals in the late 60s. When the guru moved to rural Iowa to create a “meditating community,” Walter followed, developing as a TM student and joining the flock twice a day, at dawn and dusk, in the twin vedic domes on the outskirts of town.
It is this tradition Walter has in mind when he speaks with great enthusiasm about how intense Pac Man play constitutes it’s own form of meditative contemplation. And not just Pac Man. When champion players are at the helm of any classic game, he says, they can settle into the same flow state as great athletes, or become ego-less like Buddhist monks, or tap into what Zen students of samurai swordsmanship called mushin. “They combine utter focus with extreme relaxation,” Walter likes to explain, “carrying out perfect moves in sequence over and over again. Maybe like mantras — and not unlike what I’ve studied for 30 years with the Maharishi.”
The top players, Walter says, exercise yogic focus and physical surrender to compete. Navigating Pac Man is a matter of aching patience; marathon play like Robert’s requires corporeal endurance. When Robert did let go of the controls after 48 hours and eight hundred waves, his palms were swollen to twice their normal size and stuck in a claw-like grip that lasted several days. His elbows were inflamed and frozen at an angle. His back felt like it was on fire. He was starving. And also exhilarated. Still hungry, Robert got on the A-train back to Brooklyn and before he fell asleep, eventually missing his stop, he recalls thinking that he knew he could have gone further. “I felt the draw,” he says. “I know the possibility is there.” Robert says he is eager to face Star Wars again soon, despite likening the experience to walking across the country, or counting from 1 to 100,000. “As boring as it sounds,” he says, “there is, however, a purpose. You are in motion, continually moving forward.” When he tells people he did this, the first thing they ask is, “Why?" To which Robert responds: “Why is the wrong question. Why does anyone do anything?”
I got to witness some of this event at MAGFest this past week - http://magfest.org - I met Walter - he's a pretty cool guy, I've lived just an hour or so from Twin Galaxies all my life and never knew it existed.
-dc from Iowa
Posted by: David Champion | Jan 05, 2009 at 09:29 PM