Career
Day has had several professions and hobbies during his lifetime, including being an oil trader, landlord, vintage-newspaper vendor, musician and video arcade owner.
After moving to the town of Fairfield, Iowa, Day sold commemorative newspapers for a living and in 1980 went to Houston, Texas to become an oil futures trader. Discouraged, Day moved back to Fairfield and became a landlord and purchased the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa in 1981. After reading a January 1982 issue of TIME magazine, which featured video games on its cover, Day was inspired to create an international scoreboard database. According to Day's company web site, six months later he began receiving 50 to 75 phone calls per day from video game players around the world wanting to report their high scores. Later, Day became "known as the king of video game stats" and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1982. He became so well known for his video game record-keeping that the Guinness World Records chose him as their assistant editor of video game scores for their 1984 to 1986 editions of the Guinness Book of World Records. Later, Day closed his Ottumwa arcade in 1984 but continued his international score keeping activities through his company Twin Galaxies.
In 1997, Day co-authored a 1,000-page volume of video game record scores and created a team of volunteers to verify scores nationwide. Day and his staff created the first book of rules for competitive electronic gaming, and his company Twin Galaxies produced an annual 1,000 page book of records and rules. A second edition, of 1500 pages was published in 2008. The publication has become the "official record book for the worldwide electronic gaming industry". Day has appeared at "hundreds" of video game gatherings and competitions wearing a black-and-white-striped referee shirt and became an "iconic" figure in regard to video game records.
In 2005, Day led a contingent of video game players to France to issue a formal video game challenge between players from London and Paris. Day was featured in a three part documentary filmed by VBS.tv and published on the Internet in 2009, under the title Walter Day: Twin Galaxies and the Two Golden Domes. Day's contributions to the video game industry were portrayed in the 2007 documentaries The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade.
Day retired from the video game industry in May 2010 because a New Hampshire for-profit company has taken over Day’s record-keeping tradition and also to pursue his music career. He helped found the International Video Game Hall of Fame in Ottumwa, Iowa in August 2010 and in 2012, he was invited to a video game art exhibition at the Smithsonian art museum.
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