1987 Video Game Masters Tournament:   the lost results

    As you may know from reading the score listings on the CAGDC Guinness records page, there were a series of Guinness Book of World Records (GBWR) editions that featured contest results from Twin Galaxies, and the APA (Amusement Players Association, run by Steve Harris).  Unfortunately, Guinness decided to stop publication of these results after 1987, due mostly to their doubt that the scores could be overseen well enough to guarantee their veracity.  While caution is always dictated in these matters, I believe that the loss of this information more than offsets the few results that were false, or inaccurate.

    Fortunately, I (unlike TG, Steve Harris, or most anyone else) made sure to not only obtain the results from these extremely important (historically speaking) contests, but I made sure to safeguard them, so that I would have them well into the future.  Little did I know back then how useful they would become.  Not only did I assist Walter Day, in a major way, on the first edition of his record book in 1997 (by providing dozens of pages of these type of results and listings), but with the advent of the Internet, and its popularity, now all can benefit by being able to look up, and find, just this type of information.

    All that being said, I'll now get to the point; since the editors of the Guinness book were too narrow-minded to publish the scores from the final Video Game Masters Tournament, held in 1987, the results have been 'lost'... until now !  Reproduced on this page are all of the scores, and information, from that tourney.

    I participated in the tournament that year, as I had since my first one in 1985, and traveled around 800 miles total to visit locations across the state of Ohio (which was adjacent to where I lived, in Kentucky).  I competed on Crystal Castles against my friend, and gaming adversary, Frank Seay, and fortunately, I came out on top.  My 'reward' ?  Well, the score I made, a decent 894,122, wasn't tabulated into the contest results, so no one knew of my success !  Likewise, Jack Gale's world record on Karate Champ, a great 259,800 point result, has been unknown to most everyone, except, of course, for him (see his web site, at www.jackgale.com).  Unlike my score, his was tabulated, but that did him little good, since it was never published or distributed, outside of Bally's Aladdin's Castle locations, which is precisely where I obtained my results.  It's nice to have a manager as your friend, after all !

    Well, certainly there's one other thing worth mentioning, which is the result for Star Wars.  A player by the name of Sui Ming Louie is credited with having made 64,071,484 points.  Now, that score is more than double the previous one, which is the incredible 31,660,614 score set by gamer extraordinaire David Palmer the year before.  And, if his score was very much doubted by numerous top-flight gamers and TG board members, what about a score that is more than double that ??!!  Well, needless to say, when I first saw this result back in 1987 (and continuing thru the present), even I had strong doubts about it, and I am an advocate of being very careful about disbelieving scores, as many CAGDC readers know.  Still, the very fact that it is more than double a score that is, itself, around double the second-place score, is reason enough to be at least somewhat dubious.  Plus, to me, a big issue is the time needed to play.  Based on what many expert Star Wars players have told me, Mr. Louie's game should have taken around 10 or 11 hours to play.  Probably very few players remember this, but, the tourney did not officially start until 2 PM on Friday.  Now, assuming (and, this is an assumption, tho a reasonable one in all of my experience) that the location the game was played at was a standard Bally's location (almost always in a commercial mall), with standard hours (almost every one I have ever been in had their operating hours in the range of around 10 AM to 9 PM, Monday thru Saturday, and noon (or even 1 PM) to 5 or 6 PM on Sunday), then the game could only have been played on the middle contest day of Saturday.  And, that also pretty much presumes that only one game (plus, maybe another short one, that was 'killed off' early because of mistakes) was played, and the chance of that happening seem remote, as it's unlikely that such a performance would take place on one of the few possible games that could have been played.

    Still, I have to say that most of the above is conjecture, and I didn't have any firm evidence to doubt the 64M score - until now.  I just recently (September 2004) got into contact with Sui Ming Louie (pronounced Sue-ee, and yes, it rhymes with his last name !), and found out his recollections about the game.  He did not remember his score, or even an approximation of it.  He did recollect that he played in Nanuet Mall, located just north of New York City.  I asked if he remembered the threshold score that he had to beat, and he did recall both that it was 31 million, and that it was made by David Palmer.  He did not remember the settings for certain, but did think that the machine was set to give bonus shields, which is one scenario that I had envisioned.  Needless to say, that is most distressing, as it makes one wonder about the checks and balances of the contest.  Not only would the manager / attendants have to be grossly incompetent to not set the machine to the correct contest settings (6 shields total, no bonus shields, and 'hard' difficulty), but it would make me wonder if this was caught by Steve Harris, and the APA, which ran the contest.  Note that my results sheet was rather generic, and I have no indication that it was tabulated by Steve, versus Bally's (as a matter of fact, I'd guess that it was a Bally's production).  We'll probably never know for sure, but I will say that I never saw the 64M score in print in the 80's, other than on that sheet.

    In any case, because Sui said he was used to playing on replaceable shields before the contest, that pretty much makes it a lock that he couldn't possibly have gotten the 64M score on the above-mentioned Twin Galaxies tournament settings (TGTS), given that most players that go from factory settings, to the harder tournament settings, would have trouble scoring much more than 5 million, without weeks and weeks of practice (as evidenced by both Mark Boolman's and Rob Mruczek's performances under those circumstances).  And, scores above even 10 million would be extremely difficult, without months of preparation.  So, in spite of his being unsure, it's obvious to me that the machine he played on was not set to contest settings, and the score is therefore invalid, except for the logic of it being counted as a marathon score.

    Apparently, this is what ended up happening, tho probably based on an assumption on Walter Day's part.  Walter has previously stated in forum postings that he assumed the 15M and 31M scores made by David Palmer in the '85 and '86 VGMT's were done on marathon settings (in spite of this being an illogical conclusion, since Star Wars was known to be required to be on TGTS for both contests, as the contest settings books showed).  Apparently, this is part of the reason for Dave's score not being credited, since he had a higher marathon score already turned in .  Well, I provided the '86 and '87 results (as noted in the 1st edition of Walter's book, on page xxi) to Walter, who utilized some of them in his book, and he obviously concluded that Sui's score was done on marathon settings, which, apparently, turns out to have been a correct assumption in his case, unlike Dave's.

    At some point in time after his contest marathon on the game, Sui told me that he did turn over the score (which happens at 100 million points) on that same Star Wars machine, so, he was obviously capable of great play, at factory settings.  He didn't say what the score ended up as, but I get the impression that he didn't play much beyond the turnover point.  He said the game took 13 hours, and when I asked how long he thot the 64M game took, he said he thot it was around 4 hours.  He added that he could have scored higher, but that he had to leave, and so cut his game off.  However, doing the math (based on his 13 hour game) would indicate that the 64M game should have taken around 8 hours, which, while under my time estimate, is still in the ballpark, especially for a game set to give bonus shields.  This is because you can take more risks, and therefore score faster, unlike a TGTS game.

    Well, at least the Star Wars 64M score legitimacy issue is settled, for all intents and purposes.  As I mentioned above, my Crystal Castles score was not tabulated, but, I inserted the correct version in the results below, since it should have been included.  In spite of these (and, perhaps, more) errors in the tourney results, the majority of that year's record scores are hopefully correct, and included, below.  So, on that note, enjoy the list, and all of the incredible gaming scores that it holds.

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