Final Update: In an attempt to come from behind and win the 2009 Nibbler World
Championships, Dwayne Richard started a 2nd game, attempting to
beat Tim McVey's score of 648,615,390. He subsequently quit this game because he and Tim had originally agreed to a single game.
Update: Dwayne's machine froze at 498,998,470 points, putting him out of contention. Apparently, he hit it in frustration and the wiring harness disconnected. Tim ended his attempt at 648,615,390 after 25 hours.
A few months ago I wrote about billion scoring retro video game champ Tim McVey. Back then he let me in on a little secret - he was in training to break his billion plus score on Nibbler. We stayed in touch, and I got involved with a couple of guys making a documentary about Tim and this weekend's record attempt at MAGfest in Washington, DC.
I'll be running a webstream of the entire event. Getting up to a billion is expected to take at least 40 hours, so while the competition begins on Friday, it won't be until later in the weekend that we'll see that score broken.
Nibbler was the first video game that allowed players to rack up a
billion points. Tim McVey hit 1,000,042,270 points back in January 1984, a record
that still stands today. He's competing head-to-head with
Canadian Dwayne Richard, currently the #2 Nibbler player, who scored 883,402,770 points in a marathon session in 2005.
This live stream is a Retro Thing exclusive made possible by NewTek's TriCaster and Ustream.com. During the event, I'll pan the camera around and try to do some meet and greets with some of the people there as well. Bookmark this post and check back to get updates on what's going on. Good luck on breaking that Guinness World Record everybody!
