The King has lost his crown. Billy Mitchell, the infamous and former record-holder of Donkey Kong, has had his gaming records striken from the books by Twin Galaxies.

When it comes to records in games, Twin Galaxies is the end-all be-all. Their decision is the one that truly matters and according to them, Billy Mitchell cheated.

It all started with a dispute from Jeremy Young. Young claimed that “not only can original Donkey Kong arcade hardware not produce the board transition images shown in the recordings [of Mitchell’s record-breaking games], but that these transitions were actually generated through the use of MAME,” a software emulation program that doesn’t qualify as an original game according to Twin Galaxies’ bylaws.

Twin Galaxies launched a long investigation into Mitchell’s recordings following the dispute made by Young. After months of research, they concluded that there was sufficient evidence to strip Mitchell of all his records, not just those of Donkey Kong. They didn’t directly accuse Mitchell of using MAME, choosing instead to state that, “While we know for certain that an unmodified original DK arcade PCB did not output the display seen in the videotaped score performances, we cannot definitively conclude that what is on the tapes is MAME.”

Mitchell hasn’t held the official record for Donkey Kong for a number of years. His true claim to fame was his status as the first person ever to achieve a score above 1 million in the game and the movie The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, in which he and Steve Wiebe battle for Donkey Kong supremacy. With Twin Galaxies’ ruling, Wiebe will be officially known as the first player to score above 1 million.

Of course, time has passed both Wiebe and Mitchell by. Even before the Mitchell ruling, neither player held a spot in the top ten high scores list. The top spot is now held by Robbie Lakeman with a score of 1,247,70.

Twin Galaxies has taken great strides to ensure the integrity of their leaderboards over the years and this is only the latest example of them doing their due diligence.