More Big Scores

Who would have imagined that news would be keeping a Donkey Kong blog so busy?

Forgive me for beating a dead horse, but the action on the Donkey Kong leaderboard is coming so fast and furious now (relative to the norm), that my surprise really can't be overstated.

I've discussed Dave, Mark, and Estel's million-point games, as well as Dean's new MAME world record.

Since then, four more notable scores have been achieved, three of them being million-point games:

• Kyle Goewert, after a recent move from 970,300 to 987,600, finally broke the million-point barrier on April 27th, scoring 1,012,800. Goewert never moved from sixth place, and would actually slip to seventh within a few weeks, due to the next score in this list.
• Leaderboard newcomer Shaun Boyd blasted to fourth place with 1,037,500. Boyd, whose personal best up to that game (achieved only two weeks earlier) was 776,800—good for 15th place—shot instantly into the company of the upper elite. This score was the culmination of a two-year journey with the game, which Boyd chronicled every step of the way in a Twin Galaxies forum thread.
• On May 6th, classic gaming veteran and record-crushing beast Ben Falls achieved a score of 1,010,400. Ben has not sent in the recording for verification (perhaps because he is gunning for better?) but the score is certainly worth mentioning. It soundly eclipses, at any rate, his 903,400 score from 2009 (which, by the way, would have been good for the world record a decade ago, and is now merely enough to round out the top 10).
• Finally, in mid-May, Hans Kollinger, a player previously unknown to competitive Donkey Kong, put up a very strong 885,800.

It took 23 years for there to be two players in the world who could achieve a million points at Donkey Kong. Another two and a half years went by before the third came along, and (other than for that player beating his own scores) all was quiet for another year, until December 2011.

Since then, five more players have joined the once-exclusive million point club (if you count poor Estel as an honorary member, which I do). To be fair, most of them had been "knocking on the door" for some time, but it looks like the door has collapsed under the combined pressure!