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The Marathon Man Hello! TT here again. At this month’s Editorial Meeting at Rodent Towers it was suggested that anyone who holds more than one videogame world record must have no life. I steadfastly challenged this, and was asked to prove the theory wrong. Me and my big mouth…So, another month, another interview; and back over the Atlantic to Florida. I wanted to track down Todd Rogers, who holds over two thousand classic console and arcade world records. Has Todd been a pipe and slippers man all his life? I was about to find out.Hello Todd Rogers! Yo! Good to speak to you guys.
Thanks Todd. Now then, you are the world record holder on how many videogames exactly? Uh... on like two thousand and forty or thereabouts. Fuck me that’s insane! And these are all older classic consoles right? Most are. But there’s a whole bunch on PC, Dreamcast, Xbox and such. I started out on the older consoles obviously when dad came home with a Pong home machine that hooked up to the TV and it went from there. So why videogames? We lived in a Chicago suburb, like 26 miles out of the city and my neighbourhood was surrounded with industrial sites, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do for us - videogames came along in the late 70s early 80s and that was the thing that I could do well.. So well in fact, that you were actually employed by Activision to showcase games is that right? Yeah, in 1980 I used to submit scores to get into their magazines. When I say submit, I actually sent a deluge of scores - high score after high score after high score. Eventually they said "OK lets get this kid in and see if he’s the real deal". They invited me to the Chicago’s Consumer Electronics Show to check me out and promote their product on their stand. That led to a whole bunch of other stuff with sponsorships and play testing new games. I would have been about 16 at that time…Then the floodgates opened and I was reviewing product for about 42 different software publishers and doing stuff for big names like Nintendo and Sega. Wow - so what would you regard as your crowning achievement Todd? Probably my time on "Dragster" by Activision. You had to shift your dragster in a certain way to achieve the fastest possible time down a drag track. Some people submitted scores that were false. I submitted mine and got a call from Activision asking me how I got my time. I explained in detail what I did over the phone. Well it turns out the guys who wrote the game, David Crane and Alan Miller, got together and simulated a “perfect run” for the game on a computer, using the code from the game. The time the computer came up with was 5.54 seconds. Supposedly the fastest possible score a player could achieve. I beat it by 3 hundredths of a second.
I was hoping you might have said your eighty seven hours marathon session on "Journey’s Escape"? Well you can take your pick - I’ve marathoned 67 videogames for 24 hours or more straight... Ahah hahaha! That’s insane! So what are the practicalities of marathon videogaming then? Well, insomnia helps. I’ve been diagnosed with that. You don’t say... Absolutely. That and you don’t really want to eat or over-drink you know what I mean? Especially not iced drinks - you’ll be pissing A LOT. You don’t want to do that. So if I’m going to eat something, it’s going to be fruit. And I’m going to drink tepid water. And with Journey’s Escape, you don’t get any time - if you leave the game standing for more than 30 seconds, it will end. If you miss the scarab bus, you can’t go back, as there isn’t enough time. It’s intense. What about poo? Excuse me? Turd. You know, what if you need to take a dump? Oh. Well, I’m not going to eat anything that’s going to build up in there you know? No beef, no fibre, that sort of thing. Because you don’t want that. You want to clear everything out before you start if you know what I’m saying. But you can hold your backside for a while, it’s really the water that’s the problem unless you get the runs then that’s another story. But you have to piss at some point surely? Oh yeah sure. Remember that 30 second gap I just told you about on Journey’s Escape? Well it’s right at the end of the game before it cycles again to the first screen. That’s when you can drain your lizard. In my case it was into a Burger King cup. Now that’s classy. I like it. Sponsorship opportunities abound there Todd... I don’t think so somehow. It was plenty big enough though.
Did you have to "do the double" in it then? Nah - I planned well. If I did need to crap, I would have been up Shit’s Creek if you’ll excuse the pun - there just isn’t enough time in Journey’s Escape. Gorf is another matter - there are places you can hide in that game and go take a dump and come back - no problem. Besides I’m 250 pounds - a Burger King cup? No way. I would have needed a KFC bucket on hand. Let’s say I like my food and what goes in must come out at some point or another.
So I hear - especially pizza? Correct. I order a triple cheese pizza over here, and I also bring in 2lbs of Swiss to add to their triple cheese, now that’s a Toddly pizza. I got challenged one time to finish off 10 Big Macs and a gallon of chocolate milk in an hour. It was hard going, but you know I got through it. A gallon? Yep, one gallon. I laid off the chocolate milk for a while after that day. Mind if I puke right here right now? Anyway, we’re off track here Todd. Tell me about Playboy? Well in those days the electronics industry was everywhere and Playboy wanted to be involved. So they’d be at all the shows. They’d want to trade games for movies and stuff, so I met a lot of porn stars - Ron Jeremy, Marilyn Chambers, and Ginger Lynn amongst others... It was a lot of fun. I’ll bet.. Yeah - say no more! They were all nice people - they spoke to me as a person you know. Shame a lot of them aren’t with us any more.
Didn’t Playboy ask you to endorse a special joystick one time? They wanted me to endorse a pink penis shaped joystick. They quoted me a sum of money to endorse this dildo joystick thing, but I thought, "you know what, they can find someone else". Can you imagine Track & Field on that thing? No way. I mean, why not go the whole hog and do a Missile Command trackball with a nipple on for chrissakes. So videogames and sex kind of crossed over for you in those days? Oh yeah - I started having sex when I was seven, you see our neighbours had 10 children that were mostly a little older then me when I was a kid and they were all promiscuous, so mixing with porn stars was second nature I guess... If you went to an arcade and played, girls would love the fact that I could hog a machine all day on one quarter - they wanted to be with guys who were popular. But make no mistake I wanted to make money and be famous first and foremost. I played against Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky back then. But on my own terms - I never threw a game to let them win. I asked Jack Tramiel, the president of Atari, to watch my spot at the Atari booth while I had the runs at a trade show one time - that didn’t go down so well.
Have you ever had sex while playing a videogame? Oh yeah - one time this girl wanted to give me a blow job while I played. After two hours, I knew she’d fallen asleep because I felt saliva running down my nutsack. That was weird, man. It’s fair to say you’ve had some interesting jobs in later life Todd.. Yeah, I was a roadie for Pantera for a while - that got ugly at times. I was a repo man and a bounty hunter - that was good money, but it needed to be - I had a gun pulled on me by a lunatic one time. Of course I’ve been a telemarketer. That was interesting. You’d make up names to keep yourself entertained. The night would start out "Hello, my name is Todd Rogers" and end up "Hello, my name is Rubin Hertzshiezer", or"Yates Butternuts" or whatever. And spiders? Yeah I breed exotic spiders. Tarantulas are my speciality. My oldest one died last year aged sixteen. He was eleven and a quarter inches. He’d eat four foot snakes, yellow chickens, shrews, hawks, jumbo rats - that sort of thing. I get through a thousand crickets in three days feeding them. Fucking hell... Yeah - I have three that are ten and a half inches now. These things go for like three hundred bucks a piece. When they lay eggs, you’re talking eight hundred eggs in a sack. At 60 dollars a pop. So there’s some money to be made. I trade spiders with a lot of people all over the country. I’m starting to get back into it now…
So what about nowadays with regards to Gaming Todd? What’s next? Well I don’t own any arcade machines, so I need to travel around to play those - places like Funspot in New Hampshire - its like a candy store! But I have fifty four consoles to keep me entertained here at home. I want to take down the Super Pacman world record, the Krull world record and take down my own Gorf record with 6 ships. Tip top. Todd, its been a real pleasure - thanks for sharing with us. Cheers guys. Its been a real pleasure. So there you have it chaps - a nicer guy you couldn’t ask to meet. Read up on Todd’s exploits at his blog. See you next month. October 2006
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