Todd Rogers’ long-lasting career drowns in accusations
In 1982, hardcore gamer Todd Rogers established a 5.51-second time in Dragster, an Activision sim game with, well, drag racing. This unbeatable performance granted him a special spot in the gaming world’s hall of fame and, 19 years later, in the Guinness Book of World Records. But all this is about to collapse.
In Dragster (a game playable on Atari 2600), you had to pull “perfect shifts” in order to gain speed across the screen. This required perfecting your upshift sequence, a thing Todd Rogers mastered in the end by achieving the 5.51-second run. Allegedly he took a photo and send it to Activision, which confirmed the score.
This particular game record launched Rogers towards the peak of video gaming industry, becoming one of the most prominent gamers in the world. He joined the US National Video Game Team and went on establishing over 1,700 records (in various games) throughout his “pro” career.
In 2000, Rogers’ scores are submitted in the Twin Galaxies database (world’s biggest video game records collector) establishing his reign in the digital database world as well. The problem is there’s no actual proof that all those records really happened, although the Dragster creator (and Activision co-founder) David Crane has no doubts about Todd Rogers’ record.
However, gamers analyzed Dragster speed runs frame by frame and reached the conclusion that the 5.51 is virtually impossible. Listen to Omnigamer explaining it to us thoroughly.
A fairly big group of gamers are trying to debunk Rogers’ career ascension, showing all the gamer’s wrongdoings; and there seems to be a lot of them, as YouTube user Apollo Legend shows in this clip below.
All this negative attention made Twin Galaxies conduct its own investigation, which recently resulted in erasing all of Rogers’ records from the site’s database. Moreover, in its statement, Twin Galaxies stated that they have notified Guinness World Records of its decision.
via Washington Post