After nearly 20 years and millions of quarters, someone has attained the unthinkable: a perfect score on Pac-Man.
The world record was set by 33-year-old Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, during a US-Canada clash over the Fourth of July weekend. Mitchell took more than six hours to complete the game at the Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire.
To achieve the game’s maximum score of 3,333,360 points, Mitchell navigated 256 boards (or screens), eating every single dot, blinking energizer blob, flashing blue ghost, and point-loaded fruit, without losing a single life.
“It was tremendously monotonous,” said Mitchell, a father of three and president of Rickey’s World Famous Sauces, a manufacturer of Louisiana hot sauces.
Excerpted from ‘Gobbling Up a Pac-Man Record‘ by Leander Kahney. Published in Wired on July 8, 1999.