The story
Founded by Walter Day in 1981.1
In mid-1981, Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies, Inc., visited more than 100 video game arcades over four months, recording the high scores that he found on each game.
On November 10, 1981, Day opened his arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, naming it Twin Galaxies.
On February 9, 1982, Day's database of records was released publicly as the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard.
Twin Galaxies' first event formed state teams from the top players in North Carolina and California, facing them off in a "California Challenges North Carolina All-Star Playoff". The teams played in 17 different games in Lakewood, California, and Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. California defeated North Carolina 10–7 over the weekend of August 27–30, 1982.
In September, 1982, the book "Defending the Galaxy" is released—and declaring Twin Galaxies as the "Video Game Capital of the World", and describing the California/North Carolina contest just held.
On November 30, 1982, Ottumwa mayor Jerry Parker declared the town "Video Game Capital of the World", a claim that was backed up by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, Atari and the Amusement Game Manufacturers Association in a ceremony at Twin Galaxies on March 19, 1983.
Beginning in the summer of 1982, Video Games magazine and Joystick published high-score tables taken from Twin Galaxies' data. Additional high-score charts also appeared in USA Today, Videogiochi (Milan, Italy), Computer Games, Video Game Player and Electronic Fun.
On January 8–9, 1983, Twin Galaxies organized its first world championship, which was filmed by ABC-TV's That's Incredible! and aired on February 21, 1983.
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In March 1983, Twin Galaxies was contracted by the Electronic Circus to assemble a professional troupe of video game high-scorers. Though the Circus was scheduled to visit 40 cities in North America, its Boston inaugural performance lasted only five days, closing on July 19. The players selected by Twin Galaxies for the Circus are believed to be history's first professionally contracted video game players.
On July 25, 1983, Twin Galaxies established the first professional U.S. National Video Game Team. The USNVGT toured the United States during the summer of 1983 in a 44-foot GMC bus filled with arcade games, appearing at arcades around the nation and conducting the 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament, the results of which were published in the 1984 US edition of Guinness World Records.
In 1988, the Guinness Book of World records stopped publishing records from Twin Galaxies due to a decline in interest for arcade games.
On February 8, 1998, Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records was published. It is a 984-page book containing scores compiled since 1981. A second edition was published as a three-volume set in 2007. A third edition was published in 2009.
Founder Walter Day left Twin Galaxies in 2010 to pursue a career in music, and since then ownership of Twin Galaxies has changed hands several times. In 2013, Twin Galaxies began charging a fee for score submissions.
In March 2014, Jace Hall announced that he was the new "Head Custodian and Caretaker of the TWIN GALAXIES organization". On April 28, 2014, the full Twin Galaxies website, including the high score database and forum content, came back online.
From Wikipedia’s article on Twin Galaxies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3