Joshua Bearman wrote about the 2009 Nibbler Championship at the LA Weekly Blog. He says:
Why is this so awesome? Nibbler, as I mentioned in a brief aside in my Harper's piece on Billy Mitchell, was an arcade game made by the jukebox company Rock-Ola in the early 1980s. Nibbler is mostly forgotten other than its historical appeal as the sole arcade machine whose counter had enough digits to display 999,999,999 and therefore turn over at 000,000,000, or one billion points.
The game itself sucked -— "playing the thing is joyless," says Dwayne Richard, the number two Nibbler contender of all time—but as the highest of all potential scores, the "billion on Nibbler" was a universal goal in the early 80s. Many tried and failed. Eventually, on January 15, 1984, Tim McVey from Oskaloosa came to Walter's arcade and finally reached a billion after playing forty-four hours—except that instead of turning over to zeros, the counter kept going. Tim gave up at 1,000,042,270 when he realized the true milestone was ten billion points, another order of magnitude away, and sadly, well out of reach for him and all humanity. (Rock-Ola gave Tim a Nibbler machine, which he promptly traded to Walter Day's rival arcade down the street — for $200! In tokens!)
Tim is back, playing against Dwayne Richard. I put up a fairly detailed post about, talking about how Nibbler represents how obsessive classic game competition is, for the players, just another facet of human achievement. Like climbing Everest. Or enumerating Pi. And to that end, I posted the first opening to my Harper's piece, which fell by the way side for editing reasons. But it tells the story of Robert Mruczek's marathon session on Star Wars at Fascination Arcade in New York in 1984, and sets the stage for the idea of this whole pursuit as part of the epic story of man versus machine, but more importantly, man versus self.
