Twin Galaxies is a social media platform and video game database. Twin Galaxies is the official supplier of video game records to Guinness World Records.^[1]

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. (May 2019) This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2023)

Quick Facts Formation, Founder ...

Twin Galaxies

Formation	November 10, 1981; 42 years ago (1981-11-10)
Founder	Walter Day
Founded at	Ottumwa, Iowa, US
Purpose	Video game–oriented social media platform, news, competition, record keeping
Headquarters	Beverly Hills, California, US
Key people	Jace Hall (CEO) Rajat Sood (Co-founder)
Affiliations	Guinness World Records
Website	www.twingalaxies.com

Close

In mid-1981, Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies, Inc., visited more than 100 video game arcades over four months, recording the high scores that he found on each game.^{[citation needed]}

On November 10, 1981, Day opened his arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, naming it Twin Galaxies.^{[citation needed]}

On February 9, 1982, Day's database of records was released publicly as the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard.^{[citation needed]}

Twin Galaxies' first event formed state teams from the top players in North Carolina and California, facing them off in a "California Challenges North Carolina All-Star Playoff." The teams played in 17 different games in Lakewood, California, and Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. California defeated North Carolina 10–7 over the weekend of August 27–30, 1982.^[2]

In September, 1982, the book "Defending the Galaxy"^[3] is released—and declaring Twin Galaxies as the "Video Game Capital of the World," and describing the California/North Carolina contest just held.^{[citation needed]}

On November 30, 1982, Ottumwa mayor Jerry Parker declared the town "Video Game Capital of the World", a claim that was backed up by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, Atari and the Amusement Game Manufacturers Association in a ceremony at Twin Galaxies on March 19, 1983.^[4][5][6]

Beginning in the summer of 1982, Video Games magazine and Joystick published high-score tables taken from Twin Galaxies' data. Additional high-score charts also appeared in USA Today, Videogiochi (Milan, Italy), Computer Games, Video Game Player and Electronic Fun.^[7][8][9]

On January 8–9, 1983, Twin Galaxies organized its first world championship, which was filmed by ABC-TV's That's Incredible! and aired on February 21, 1983.^[10]

In March 1983, Twin Galaxies was contracted by the Electronic Circus to assemble a professional troupe of video game high-scorers. Though the Circus was scheduled to visit 40 cities in North America, its Boston inaugural performance lasted only five days, closing on July 19. The players selected by Twin Galaxies for the Circus are believed to be history's first professionally contracted video game players.^[11]

On July 25, 1983, Twin Galaxies established the first professional U.S. National Video Game Team. The USNVGT toured the United States during the summer of 1983 in a 44-foot GMC bus filled with arcade games, appearing at arcades around the nation and conducting the 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament, the results of which were published in the 1984 US edition of Guinness World Records.^{[citation needed]}

In 1988, the Guinness Book of World records stopped publishing records from Twin Galaxies due to a decline in interest for arcade games.^[12]

On February 8, 1998, Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records was published. It is a 984-page book containing scores compiled since 1981. A second edition was published as a three-volume set in 2007. A third edition was published in 2009.^{[non-primary source needed]}

Founder Walter Day left Twin Galaxies in 2010 to pursue a career in music,^[13] and since then ownership of Twin Galaxies has changed hands several times.^[14] In 2013, Twin Galaxies began charging a fee for score submissions.^[15]

In March 2014, Jace Hall announced that he was the new "Head Custodian and Caretaker of the TWIN GALAXIES organization".^[16] On April 28, 2014, the full Twin Galaxies website, including the high score database and forum content, came back online.

The US National Video Game Team was founded on July 25, 1983, in Ottumwa, Iowa, by Walter Day and the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard.^{[citation needed]}

In 2007, a film about Twin Galaxies and video game champions released in the 1980s, Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a feature documentary about retro arcade gamers, and the competition between Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, in which Walter Day and Twin Galaxies feature prominently, was released in theaters on August 24, 2007. The documentary was critical of Twin Galaxies' handling of challenges to long-established top scores and suggested that its organizational structure is rife with conflicts of interest.^{[non-primary source needed]}

Frag, a feature documentary about modern professional gamers, was released on DVD on August 1, 2008, by Cohesion Productions^[26] of Cedar Falls, Iowa. The first ten minutes of the documentary covered Twin Galaxies' role as the pioneers of organized video game playing back in the early 1980s.

Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler, a feature documentary about the video game Nibbler, was released worldwide in 2016. The film includes Twin Galaxies' history and the competition for high scores. Walter Day is featured throughout the film.

Records by both Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell were invalidated by Twin Galaxies after investigations determined that the scores were not genuine.^[27] Rogers was revealed to have entered fake records into the database either by himself or by his friend who was a referee at Twin Galaxies, whereas Mitchell was found to have used an emulator to reach certain scores despite claiming to have played on an original arcade machine, which is a violation of the Twin Galaxies rules.^[28][29]

Since August 1, 1982, Twin Galaxies has been producing stylized posters to document gaming events.^{[30][non-primary source needed]} Though the first dozen posters issued in the early 1980s had printing runs of 500–1,000 copies each, the posters created in later years have been issued as limited editions with only 20–24 copies produced.^{[citation needed]}

• Time attack
• Speedrun