Why do people work themselves into such an autistic fit over video game scores from decades ago?
It's literally a children's' toy.
People get obsessed over setting scores and records and being the best. People get livid over calls in football and baseball and outraged about people cheating. If you want to say "
I respect football/baseball/hockey/etc. more than video game high scores because it requires physical effort " hey you do you. It would be an opinion that I share, but at the end of the day it's still an opinion.
In the same vein I don't really give a shit about whether or not Billy is the champion of an arcade game from 1981 or not. Other people do. Including Billy, who relies heavily off his branding of being the "
King of Kong" and a video game champion. An individual's care for a Donkey Kong record can range from none to "fun trivia question" to "huh show me if you're that good", "wow cool to meet you I'll buy you a beer and I can have a photo?" ll the way to deifying the high scorer.
If you're going to be autistic enough to either try to be a leader on these high score boards or monitor closely who's the best and why, what Billy did with his MAME scores is offensive. Billy knew he wasn't playing on arcade hardware, and that original arcade hardware scores have a separate, more prestigious leaderboard for a reason (it's much easier to cheat on MAME). If you're going to be autistic enough to try to
compete in that community, even if you aren't competing against Billy on DK or Pacman or whatever, it's offensive because unaddressed cheating tarnishes the legitimacy of the leaderboards you seek to be on. If nobody is standing guard and cheating isn't cast aside like a leper, then the points are made up and nothing matters and being on the board is meaningless.
Jobst is a speedrunner. He believes that being the "best" by whatever measure (time to completion, high score) at an arcade/video game is an achievement worthy of respect and attention (again, so does Billy, that's his brand). That's where he gets so assblasted by Billy cheating at MAME that he got dragged into a defamation lawsuit for saying Billy was responsible for Apollo Legend's suicide based on fucking reddit comments. To Jobst, calling out Billy's cheating on MAME decades ago isn't just for clout, it's morally correct, and since Billy is a cheater, and cheating is worse than being the reason for somebody's death (reminder: this is an argument that Jobst's lawyers made in court. That Billy's reputation as a game cheat meant he could not be further damaged by being known as driving Apollo to kill himself), it's actually virtuous to bilk your fans for money on your completely untrue claim that Billy had to do with Apollo's death. Ends justify the means in essence.
Billy and Jobst are both lolcows for taking monkey arcade games too seriously. Jobst is the bigger lolcow for thinking that this made him correct to defame the dude as responsible for the suicide of another human being. Billy is a lesser lolcow that has made some really entertaining bants lately that make him an excellent heel.
