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Motherboard TV: The Man Who's Kept Score for Every Video Game Since the '80s

I think the most fascinating thing about modern networked gaming is the wealth of statistics that are available. (Yes, I’m that kind of dork.) Let’s just think of first-person shooters. I remember having my mind blown when I first started playing LAN games of Counter-Strike because of all the numbers — kill/death ratios, etc. — and then, when Halo, Modern Warfare and the like came out with gamer scores and stat trackers and all this crazy business I just didn’t know what to do with myself. So many numbers to think about, like when DICE announced that 47 billion shots were taken in the Battlefield 3 beta.

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It’s all a whole bunch of overwhelming stats-geekery, sure, but the reason I’ve been so fascinated by it is because it’s brought gaming the ability of statistically-based performance analysis like that has blessed and confounded baseball fans for years. In short, having all your numbers online lets all those faceless shit-talkers out there have their money firmly shoved where their mouths are.

But what of the arcade days? Think of Billy Mitchell, one of stars of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong, and his high-stakes battle with co-star Steve Weibe for the greatest score in Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. history. Such a high-profile competition naturally begat a number of independent sources of score verification, but who was keeping score for all the other champions in arcades around the country?

Enter Walter Day, the man behind the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard, which is the central clearinghouse for all top video game scores. In 2009 Motherboard visited Day as part of our Oral History of Gaming Series to talk shop about gaming’s biggest achievements. Day not only told us about how Twin Galaxies tracks top scores, but also shared how his small town has affected the entire world of gaming.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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