An out-of-work engineer in Redmond, Washington buys a Donkey Kong cabinet for his garage and tries to beat a decades-old record. Instead he walks into a bureaucratic conspiracy. This episode synthesizes forensic reports from a 2018 investigation, gaming history articles, and documentary archives to follow Steve Wiebe, who dissected the 1981 arcade game like a structural stress test, manipulating its random number generator and point-pressing every level to the last millisecond. His opponent was Billy Mitchell, a Florida restaurateur whose legend was the foundation of Twin Galaxies, the scorekeeping body founded by Walter Day.

In 2003 Wiebe taped a 947,200-point run and then became the first person to break one million points. Twin Galaxies sent referees to inspect his machine, discovered its circuit board came from Mitchell's rival Roy Shil ...