Is this the world’s first “perfect” game of Donkey Kong?

Copeland's 3+ hour world record run, preserved for posterity.

Since 2007's The King of Kong hit theaters, the back-and-forth race for ever-higher scores on the arcade classic Donkey Kong has attracted outsized attention from competitive gamers. Last week, Wes Copeland tried to put that battle to bed once and for all with an incredible new world record score of 1,218,000 points.

Some press reports have referred to this accomplishment as the world's first "perfect" game of Donkey Kong, implying a scoring mark that will never be surpassed. That framing has partly been driven by Copeland himself, who said on Facebook that "this will be my last record score... I don't believe I can put up a game any higher than this." A breathless post by the score-watchers at Donkey Kong Blog calls it "a score about which we could confidently say, even if not definitively, 'this will never be beaten.'"

Yet there's still some reason to believe higher Donkey Kong scores are technically achievable, even if no one in their right mind may be able to do so any time soon.

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