Twin Galaxies is a name familiar to many in the gaming community over the past three and a half decades. The organization was founded to track world record high scores in the Atari 2600 days, and it quickly became the foremost and final authority on what were considered to be authentic records. Over the years, Twin Galaxies has endured many controversies—famously, the dispute at the center of the smash documentary King of Kong—and the past week has seen the resolution of one of the organization’s longest-running scandals.
Todd Rogers became famous in the early 80s after allegedly obliterating the records for many Atari 2600 games, especially those developed by Activision. He earned the moniker “Mr. Activision,” and his hundreds of self-reported and unbelievable scores were fiercely defended by Twin Galaxies referees for years—most famously a run of Dragster, completed in what many correctly assumed was an impossible 5.51 seconds.
Last summer, a thread on the Twin Galaxies forums appeared that questioned the validity of the Dragster score, and the circumstances surrounding all of Rogers’ performances. Over the last 17 months, information began to surface, and gamers-turned-investigative-journalists compiled a shockingly robust case against the one-time “greatest gamer alive.” The video below by YouTuber Apollo Legend is a long but extremely complete analysis of the info, also shared by Twin Galaxies editorial team as a useful piece of their investigation:
In tandem with revealing statements made by a former Twin Galaxies referee, as of yesterday, all of Todd Rogers’ scores will be vacated, and his records struck from the books. Though it’s about 35 years late, justice has finally been served to the community, and “Mr. Activision” will go down in history as gaming’s greatest cheater—at least the biggest one that we’ve caught.