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Guinness Putting Out Book of Video-Game Records

Associated Press
Published | Updated

NEW YORK – Yes, Billy Mitchell is still the king of Kong.

In the first "Gamer's Edition" of Guinness World Records, due out March 11, Mitchell, of Hollywood, Fla., ranks as the top-scoring player of the arcade version of "Donkey Kong."

Mitchell's score is 0.1 percent ahead of Steve Wiebe of Redmond, Wash., whose quest to unseat Mitchell was the subject of the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters."

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Video Gaming Center.

Other highlights of the Gamer's Edition 2008:

• The biggest-selling video game of all time is "Super Mario Bros.," released by Nintendo Co. in 1985. It sold 40.2 million copies (though some were bundled with Nintendo systems).

• The highest one-day gross for a game is $170 million at the U.S. "Halo 3" launch on Sept. 25, 2007.

• The controversial crime-adventure series "Grand Theft Auto" has the most guest stars in a video game series. Its 339 voice actors include Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Liotta and Ice T.

• The largest virtual beer festival takes place once a year in "World of Warcraft." The online game's two warring factions share a truce along with the brews.

For the record, Wiebe did manage to beat Mitchell's 1985 score in "Donkey Kong," but his top rank stood for just four months before the colorful Mitchell struck back with a score of 1,050,200.

Unmentioned in the movie was the fact that the record-holder when Wiebe started his attempt was not Mitchell but Timothy Sczerby of Auburn, N.Y.

He had beaten Mitchell's 1985 record in 2000. Sczerby is listed in the Guinness book as the current No. 3, but his name is misspelled in the advance copy obtained by the Associated Press.

To keep score for "Donkey Kong" and a variety of other classic games, Guinness relied on Iowa-based Twin Galaxies, which started out in the '80s as an arcade chain but soon turned into national scoreboard and referee organization for electronic games.

Twin Galaxies supplied the Guinness Book of World Records with video-game scores in the 80s, but Guinness stopped using them in 1988, as the arcade-gaming craze started to subside.