"We felt the Canadians were Johnny-come-latelys and needed to be put in their place. "I had the knowledge in 1984, but my enthusiasm and the incentive to do it weren't there," Mitchell said. Pac-Man, a later version of the game, started their rivalry with the Canadians. That's when Mitchell and his friend, Chris Ayra, the world-record holder for the high score on Ms. Or, grab a friend and click 'Insert Coin' twice to start a two-player match with Ms. He turned his energies toward the family business, staying away from arcades until 1998. Click on the novelty logo to initiate a fully playable Pac-Man game. Mitchell, who signed his high scores "Play to Win," once retired at age 19 before attaining the perfect Pac-Man score. "I was absolutely, totally consumed and obsessed by the idea that no one could beat me," Mitchell said. Steve Wiebe's attempt to beat that record is chronicled in the 2007 documentary, King of Kong. Mitchell said he was an avid arcade player in his teens, holding world records for the highest score on Donkey Kong, which he first set in 1982 at age 17. Mitchell's entire game was recorded for posterity on videotape by a Funspot employee. I was afraid I was going to get lost inside myself." I started talking to myself, coaching myself on. " I realized I still had 100 boards to go. "It felt like I'd been playing forever," he said. He said the record-breaking game's first 20 screens were tense and grueling, while the remaining 236 screens - all identical - strained his endurance. Wearing a red-white-and-blue necktie to celebrate the holiday, Mitchell said he didn't eat for two days of the competition. "I was noticeably upset," said the soft-spoken Mitchell. Mitchell said he came very close to setting the record on July 1 - which coincidentally is Canada Day - but a kid pulled the plug about four hours into the game. The foursome set a Fourth-of-July-weekend rendezvous for their head-to-head competition. In May 1999, one of the Canadians, Rick Fothergill, came within 90 points of the perfect score while playing at the Funspot arcade, described then as the world's second-largest arcade, with about 500 games. To achieve the game's maximum score of 3,333,360 points, Mitchell navigated 256 boards (or screens), eating every single dot, blinking energizer blob, flashing blue ghost, and point-loaded fruit, without losing a single life. Mitchell and an American friend had spent the previous year in a grudge match against a pair of Canadians, trying to achieve the first perfect Pac-Man score as a matter of national pride. "To the best of our knowledge, it the first time someone's done this," said Patrick Fitzgerald, a spokesman for Midway Games, which distributed Pac-Man in the early 1980s.
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