Twin Galaxies, the organization that identifies video game record holders for Guinness World Records, nullified longest-running video game holder Todd Rogers' record for fastest completion time for the Atari 2600 racing game, "Dragster."
On Jan. 29, Twin Galaxies Adjudication and Administration Team decided that Rogers' 35-year-old record is invalid. He was also banned from participating in Twin Galaxies' leaderboards. The decision came after months of grueling debate regarding the legitimacy of his record. Not long after, Guinness World Records followed suit and removed Rogers' record from its database.
In 1982, Rogers submitted his "Dragster" record of 5.51 seconds to the official fan newsletter of Activision, the developer of the game. It must be emphasized that his record was submitted during the time when developers trusted the scores players have submitted because there is no empirical way of confirming the submitted record. Because of this, Activision acknowledged what he reported and was awarded a patch. Fast forward to 2001 and Twin Galaxies added Rogers' record to its leaderboards. In April 2017, Guinness World Records awarded Rogers with the title for the "World's Longest Standing Video Game Record."
One fact that has always been pointed out in his supposed record was his lack of evidence to support his claim. His blog contained a vague description of how he had achieved the record, pointing out how his technique bested the computer-simulated perfect run of 5.54 seconds.
His record was questioned, however, in August 2017 when Twin Galaxies introduced its Dispute System in July of the same year. Twin Galaxies member Dick Moreland disputed Roger's score in "Dragster," citing Eric "Omnigamer" Koziel's tool-assisted run analysis which showed that achieving a score of 5.51 seconds is mathematically impossible.
In a Reddit thread, Omnigamer explained that the best score achievable in the game is 5.57 seconds. Hence, Activision's computer-simulated perfect run of 5.54 seconds must be flawed in some way. Since 5.57 seconds is the optimum score in a normal play, a run with 5.51 seconds is not possible even with cheating.
