World's Oldest Competitive Game Player Passed Away
It saddens me to report that Doris Self, Q*Bert champion and competitive player, has passed on, dying from injuries received from car accident earlier this month. Doris was the oldest person to pursue video game world records, according to Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records.
From Twin Galaxies obituary:
*Doris first gained notoriety in 1983 when she achieved a world record score of 1,112,300 points on the classic arcade game Q*Bert during Twin Galaxies’ 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament, an event that was conducted for the Guinness Book of World Records. She was 58 years old then, the oldest person up to that time to capture a video game world title. Though she later lost the Q*Bert high-score title in 1985, she remained Twin Galaxies’ record holder for “oldest” champion until 2003, when John Lawton of Weirs Beach, NH, age 72, broke the world record on the classic arcade video Depth Charge. In an interview conducted in 2005, Doris laments: “I was sad when I lost the title I had held for twenty years. “Then I got a call from gaming legend Billy Mitchell, who offered to loan me a Q*bert machine to practice on and win back my title. Billy made me promise that I would give up poker and practice Q*bert everyday.”*
Doris passed away on October 3rd, she was 81 years old. For more information on Doris’ long life and fantastic career, please refer to the Twin Galaxies obituary.
via: Kotaku
Toots
Posted to Video Games on 23 October 2006
