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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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nerdy demographic I would assume would be especially fastidious about video game history claims

I wouldn't be so sure. Look at the Billy Mitchell/Twil Galaxies drama. There was definitely an atmosphere of extreme credulity in the Spike TV era of gaming as well. I imagine a lot of lore that got laid down before the 10s may turn out to be less reliable than previously thought.

I think you have an extremely warped perception of the Twin Galaxies situation. Most people in high score/speedrun communities knew the site was a total joke for over a decade. Countless people tried to have clearly fraudulent scores/times removed, but most of the time the administration was unwilling to budge. There were a few successful cases where people got things corrected, but they largely gave up. Also, for them to even let you challenge any score you had to have one submitted yourself which meant you had to pay them money and send them a run recorded on VHS and only VHS when people had long since moved on to DVD recorders or a Dazzle.

Here is a SDA thread about TG from 2007

"When twin galaxies repeatedly goes out of its way to explain how they are the official authority on gaming records, they are definately attacking every other game records site. I think that alienates a lot of people (me included). And it annoys me that they have really really shitty records (some of their arcade/console score attacks are laughable), and empty tables of records."

"I wouldn't worry about TG. It seems people who know about speedrunning and high-scoring know better than to go to TG for anything "official.""

"The last time I looked at TG, they said the fastest time in Metroid Prime was 5 minutes. Doesn't sound that official to me." The current record is 44 minutes game time, 1 hour:4 minutes real time. These times have a decade's worth more of optimization and glitches found and the Twin Galaxies rulesets disallow all glitches.

The nerdy people did know it was bullshit.

There's still some mythbusting (in particular, Ahoy's videos on the Polybius legend and his exploration of the possible first-ever video game).

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