BREAKING NEWS: Nibbler World Record Championship

January 3, 2009 on 10:44 pm | In News | No Comments

Big News! One of the big attractions and events for this year’s MAGFest has been the Nibbler World Record Championship. Up until today, Tim McVey and Dwayne Richard, two of the biggest Nibbler players in the world, have been in the console room since the beginning of MAGFest, attempting to break the 25-year old world record high score of approximately 1 billion points set by Tim in the 1982 classic arcade title Nibbler. You might know it better as Snake, the popular app on many mobile phones.

Well, it seems that last night in the wee hours of the morning, Dwayne’s Nibbler machine (which had already amassed well over 40 million points) was struck down in its prime. The game froze after Dwayne had been playing for over 19 hours, and his score was lost.

I spoke with Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day about the event. Walter oversees the event and officiates the scores for the Guinness Book of World Records. When I checked in to the console room at around 4:30pm today, I spoke to Walter and he had this to say: “Early this morning, [Dwayne's] screen froze… and it was all over.” However, perhaps out of respect for Dwayne’s loss, or maybe because he was just really tired, Tim decided to call it quits after another 6 hours and get some sleep. Tim had already amassed 648 million points or so, setting the record for the 2009 championship.

After Dwayne got a few hours sleep, Walter told me that Dwayne “Still had one day to play. So, he decided to try again!” At time of writing, Dwayne was back up to 17 million and going strong. Only time will tell if he passes the record.

I also had a chance to speak with Mr. MAGFest himself, a.k.a Brendan Becker, to get his thoughts on the incident. He told me that the convention didn’t even have the two Nibbler cabinets until 9pm Thursday night. Apparently, the provider of the machines didn’t have vertical cabinets which the players required, and the backup provider bailed and couldn’t be contacted. Brendan and his staff bought two cabinets “on the spot” from a vendor in Mananas. “I thought we had that worked out,” he said.
When Nibbler 2 broke, Brendan and the rest of the MAGFest crew had to convince the players to stick around. Brendan and his crew pretty much had to wing it in order to keep things running, but Brandon told me “If there’s anything MAGfest is good at, it’s winging it.”

Now that the incident has more or less blown over, Brendan said he was glad that both players had a chance to sleep and to experience just a little bit of the con, and he hopes that they get to catch some of the concerts as well. All the other events have been “extremely smooth,” and Brandon said that the Nibbler crisis was really the only significant “speed bump” that the crew had faced.
~Joe Newman