Twin Galaxies - Iron Man Contest

Iron Man Contest

In the first week of July, 1985, Twin Galaxies conducted the 1st Twin Galaxies Iron Man Contest. The goal of the Iron Man competition was simple: competitors had to continue playing their game for as long as they could. If anyone passed 100 hours, they would be awarded a $10,000 prize from the Sports Achievement Association.

The first contestant to fall was Dwayne Richard; after an hour at the Robotron machine and a score of 3,352,150 he walked away saying no way can a guy play Robotron for a hundred hours. Originally the game he chose to marathon was Armor Attack. However, Johnny Zee was not able to get it for the contest so Dwayne was forced to pick another game. Richard gave up because of the difficulty to marathon Robotron for such an extended amount of time. The next person to resign from the contest was a Japanese tourist visiting Victoria, BC, who resigned after seven hours. The gaming continued unbroken until the 24-hour barrier, at which point Tom Asaki lost his Nibbler game due to a glitch in the game. Each extra life accumulated would add one to the Extra Lives data (stored as a single byte). Reaching 128 Extra Lives, however, caused a problem; it was erroneously interpreted as a "negative one" by the game's firmware (the game's designer had not anticipated anyone achieving this many Extra Lives) and the game ended abruptly. Asaki did not even know of this bug until warned by Billy Mitchell that he was accumulating lives too fast. Tom's game ended with a score of 300 million points.

Mitchell himself was the next to go, after 39 hours. The trackball broke down due to the body oils from his hands. By the time the machine could be repaired, Mitchell was already in a deep sleep, effectively eliminating him from the competition. His game ended with 10,774,191 points.

Mark Bersabe lost his final man on Asteroids after 45 hours, with a score of 18,552,590 points (far from Scott Safran's record of 41,336,440 points). Jeff Peters, who played Q*Bert while sitting in a recliner (with the control panel in his lap) lasted until the fifty-hour mark until collapsing from exhaustion, with 19,498,150 points.

The winner of the contest was 18-year-old James Vollandt, who carried his Joust game for 67½ hours. After being the only one remaining in competition (after Peters' elimination), he resorted to dangerous techniques to keep himself awake, including blasting his face with freon, starting at the sixty-hour mark. The game malfunctioned at around 58 hours, wiping out all of his 210 extra lives. However, he earned back forty of them. He left the game voluntarily, with a record-breaking score of 107,216,700 points, a record that stood until 2010, when John McAllister broke the record over live streaming video on justin.tv.