Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade

In 1982 the arcades in America were at their brightest. A group of young people were setting world records on those machines, their names appearing in magazines, counting themselves champions. Twenty-five years later the documentary finds those people and asks what became of them. Some are still playing, some have moved into a completely different life, and some have never got past those years. Billy Mitchell and Walter Day are among them. Lincoln Ruchti's documentary was made in 2007, when these names were still uncontested. What came afterwards is a separate story: in 2018 Twin Galaxies cancelled Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong records on the grounds that the game had been played on a modified machine. Guinness restored its own records in 2020. The lawsuit Mitchell brought ended in a settlement in 2024 and the scores returned to the site's historical database. Because the film was made before that argument, it tells all of it as it stood. Ninety minutes.