Yesterday, notable arcade gamer Billy Mitchell celebrated on social media as his scores were, in his words, "reinstated" on score tracking database Twin Galaxies following the settlement of a lengthy defamation lawsuit. Twin Galaxies, however, wants you to know that its opinion on Mitchell's disputed scores has not changed, and it's now selling "educational t-shirts" poking fun at the whole ordeal.
Twin Galaxies has, indeed, brought back Billy Mitchell's old scores, but only in an archival version of the database intended to preserve the site's scores from before it changed ownership in 2014. "Twin Galaxies' mandate is to verify that submissions meet verification guidelines, not to investigate how they are produced," the site said in a statement that was otherwise pretty vague on the nature of Mitchell's scores. The announcement did acknowledge the opinion of USC's Dr. Michael Zyda, which noted that it would be difficult to determine the legitimacy of Mitchell's scores one way or the other after years of degradation to original arcade hardware.
