Billy Mitchell is a former competitive video game player. He initially rose to national prominence in the 1980s when Life magazine included him in a photo spread of video game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games. Mitchell was subsequently recognized by Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records as the holder of several records on classic games.
Mitchell’s achieved the first perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the original Pac-Man arcade on July 3, 1999. David Ramsey, writing for the Oxford American in 2006, described Mitchell as “probably the greatest arcade video game player of all time”.
Throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, Mitchell was an interview subject in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming, including Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (2007), The King of Arcades (2014), and Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler (2015). Mitchell was a subject of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007), which followed his attempts to maintain his high score on Donkey Kong after it was threatened by newcomer Steve Wiebe.