80 Year-Old Woman Wants World Record Title Back

Posted on May 30, 2005

Doris Self, of Fort Lauderdale, eats, drinks and sleeps Q*Bert, the classic video game from the early 1980s, practicing day and night. And, if she breaks the Q*bert record, she'll be history's oldest video game world champion.

Doris says, "I was the Q*bert champion in 1984 with a score of 1,112,300 points. At that time, I was the oldest video game champ in the world at 58 years old, a fact verified by Twin Galaxies' scorekeeper Walter Day. It's still listed in Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records, the gaming industry's official book of records."

Though Doris' score was bested in 1985, she still retained the status of "oldest" champion until 2003 when John Lawton, 72, of New Hampshire, captured the Depthcharge title.

Doris says, "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."

In the early 1980s Billy Mitchell was the most successful video gamer listed in the U.S. edition of the Guinness Book of World Records and was proclaimed the "Player-of-the-Century" at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show. Thanks to Mitchell's support, Doris is ready for her big day of truth, which comes the weekend of June 2-5, when she joins an annual gathering of classic gamers at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH, to go for world records.

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