If you want to solve an unsolvable problem, give it to a gamer. We can find a way to beat anything, including games that were never designed to be beaten. Observe these unstoppable forces that moved the immoveable object:
1. Billy Mitchell – Pac-Man
Many classic arcade games have no final victory condition. You just keep playing progressively harder versions of the same boards until your three lives are up.
Pac-Man can’t really be beaten in a sense, but it can be broken. After you hit the maximum score of 3,333,360, the game glitches out and you can no longer clear a board. The hardest of the hardcore arcade gamers have known this for decades, but in 1999 Billy L. Mitchell (yes, the King of Kong Billy Mitchell) became the first person known to have done this without losing a single life.
That’s six hours glued to the machine and eating every single dot, every possible ghost, power-pill, fruit, everything. And unlike Pac-Man, Mitchell himself refused to eat until he was done.
According to this report, when Mitchell finished he stepped away from the machine and declared, “I never have to play that darn game again.”
2. “Little Gray” – World of Warcraft
MMOs like World of Warcraft are specifically designed to be without end. There’s always something more to do.
Unless you’re Little Gray.
Little Gray is a Twainese WoW player who has all of WoW’s 986 achievements. Every. Frickin. One.
Okay, technically he missed one event-specific achievement, but that doesn’t change the fact that he completed 5,906 quests—averaging about 14 a day—in order to pull it off.
If you’ve ever been accused of spending too much time playing WoW, tell them about this guy.
3. Vincent Ocasla – SimCity 3000
Many games in the SimCity series are unwinnable. You keep your city going as long as you can, but sooner or later it breaks down.
Vincent Ocasla has designed a city called Magnasanti, a roadless, completely efficient city of six million residents. It took him 1.5 years of his life just to plot it all out on paper, and then another 2.5 years of building it in-game.
Before you ask Ocasla to sit on your city planning committee, keep this in mind: the city is not designed to be paradise. It’s designed to be orderly in the Emperor Palpatine sense. There are no hospitals or schools, but there are plenty of police to keep the population in line. Pollution is high and the citizens tend not to live past the age of 50. Even Ocasla says, “There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness.”
Ocasla is studying architecture, at least until Darkseid hires him to redesign Apokolips.
-Jason MacIsaac
