While any self-discerning gamer that's been out of their teens for a while will be more than aware of names like Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe and Hank Chien, a new one has burst onto the scene in the last six months that has blown all but one out of the water. Vincent Lemay, a 21 year old from Quebec has this weekend toppled all but the current grandmaster himself, with a score that's less than 3,000 away from a new world record.
Any fans of surgeon Hank Chien can rest easy, as he's still the top dog for now, but Lemay beat out all other competitors this weekend as he managed to score a very impressive 1,135,900, putting him just 2,700 behind Chien's current world record of 1,138,600.
Lemay appeared on the Donkey Kong world scene last year when he placed among some of the world's best at the Kong Off 2, which sees some of the greatest compete live. That day Lemay managed to beat all time great, Billy Mitchell, by quite a sizeable margin, but he couldn't catch up to Wiebe or Chien. Interestingly though, those two couldn't keep up with MAME aficionados Jeff Willms or Dean Saglio either.
Now though Lemay looks poised to give Chien some serious competition, as with such a close score on a game that should have been his, he's certain to take another run a the record. According to the breakdown by the DKBlog, Lemay was actually ahead of Chien on scoring throughout most of his game, despite losing most of his lives early on in the run. However on his last man he raked in over 500,000 points, only missing the overall record by a tiny margin thanks to some tenaciously difficult last levels that seemingly wouldn't let him score what he needed.
It's certainly going to be an interesting 2013 for Donkey Kong record fans.
What's your personal bests guys? Mine sits at a paltry 76,700.