I had a novel idea: play some games at Funspot, do as well as I could, and then compare my scores to the world records. It turns out this was more difficult than I anticipated!
For starters, it’s often difficult to find any high scores for certain games. The obvious source would be Twin Galaxies, but that’s a site with a lot of baggage and it’s hard to judge the accuracy of many of their records. Even worse, it’s hard to even find records on their abysmal webpage!
Secondly, since most arcade games have dip-switches that allow the operator to adjust difficulty, it’s not always as easy as comparing a score to one recorded online since I may have played a different version of the game. I think this is likely for Funspot, which (obviously, and understandably) seems to set their games at the hardest mode.
Thirdly, certain games have ‘tricks’ that seem to disqualify high scores when used. The enforcement of this seems dubious to say the least: Pac-Man for instance has patterns that every master player uses, but the ‘t-block’ in Qix is apparently frowned upon if used in a high scoring run. Suffice to say I didn’t know any of these tricks, and used none!
I played dozens of different games at Funspot, but for fourteen of them I recorded my scores (some of which came from multiple attempts) to compare to the records. For three of these (Gaplus, Galaga ’88 and Marble Madness) I was unable to find reputable high score info, and for the remaining eleven here are my scores plotted as a percentage of the world records:
Overall, I’d say I did fairly well! Sure my 9,545 points in Missile Command wasn’t too close to the world record of almost 104,000,000 but I only played for a few minutes where the record took 72 hours! And my ten minute score of 128,552 on Star Wars wasn’t bad since the world record (300 million) took 54 hours. I’d say everything from Qix (a game which becomes incredibly difficult very quickly) upwards is impressive, and Track & Field is, if I may be so humble, a stupendous achievement!
I’ll be the first to admit I’m a little rusty. I used to be able to effortlessly defeat Black Tiger on one credit, but this time my game (2.1% of the world record) only reached stage two. I only destroyed two Death Stars on Star Wars and I didn’t even use the legendary ‘triple flapper’ method on Track & Field! But I’m happy with my results after only a few attempts and will refer back to this post when next we visit to try and improve on each game 🙂
This post also gives me a new topic to ponder: compared to every other player in the world, I wonder which game I’m the best at?
QWOP score plx