He's the leader of  PAC-MAN

Hollywood restaurateur Billy Mitchell was the first to play a perfect game of 'Pac-Man.' As the game turns 25, he's still hungry.

BY PETE FREEDMAN

At Rickey's, his popular Hollywood restaurant, Billy Mitchell looks every bit a customer, laughing at a back table with friends who happen to double as business partners.

Lunch finished, he shakes his friends' hands goodbye. Mitchell's 6-foot-4 frame looms over them. With his carefully trimmed beard and hair that hits his shoulders, the 39-year-old should be a menacing figure -- a biker, perhaps, or maybe a professional wrestler. But the comparison fails. Mitchell's persona is more inviting than imposing. And his sport is far less taxing.

This month, as the Pac-Man arcade game celebrates its 25th anniversary, Mitchell remains the first of just four men to have done what was once deemed impossible throughout the video game world. Six years ago, he played Pac-Man to perfection. It took six hours -- and just one of Pac-Man's finite lives -- for Mitchell to guide the famed yellow hero through 256 levels of dots, fruits and ghosts. Guiding Pac-Man over the final dot, he bragged to a friend over his cellphone.

Back at the restaurant, his partners head for the door. Mitchell calls out to them and nods toward the small arcade room.

''Want to play a game?'' he asks.

There's no Pac-Man there -- just Sega Daytona Racing, Golden Tee 2005 and Ms. Pac-Man, another of his favorites -- but Mitchell's reputation precedes him. Neither man is interested.

''That's the problem with being the champ, Billy,'' says the partner with fewer hairs left on his head. ``No one wants to play you.''

Mitchell smiles knowingly.

He once felt like the champion wrestler he appears to be. Two months after his perfect game, Mitchell was asked to participate in a Japanese game show in Tokyo and told to take the stage by walking through the studio audience. He towered over the audience as security guards flanked him, keeping fans at bay.

''It was like rock star status,'' Mitchell says. ``I felt like George Bush.''

A few days earlier, Namco, the company that created Pac-Man, named Mitchell the greatest video game player of the century. Before his perfect game in July 1999, at least 10 billion games of Pac-Man had been played in arcades worldwide. Video game enthusiasts still equate his achievement to finding the Holy Grail.

''Pac-Man's perfect game is merciless,'' says Walter Day, a video game referee who compiles the Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records.

Pac-Man's creators never believed such a feat possible -- they didn't even bother creating an ending for the game. Instead, at level 256, the game malfunctions due to a lack of memory. When news of Mitchell's game spread to Japan, Namco invited him to the visit the offices where Pac-Man was created.

There, Mitchell was finally able to ask the things he'd wondered about since he first played the game in 1983, three years after its release. They were questions he thought only Namco founder Masaya Nakamura could answer. But the Father of Pac-Man, Mitchell says, sat stunned, overcome by the fact that the stranger sitting before him had cracked his code.

''Mr. Mitchell, we have no idea,'' Nakamura told him. ``You know more about Pac-Man than we do.''

All Nakamura did, he told Mitchell, was create the program code for the game. He hadn't the faintest clue as to why certain things in the game unfolded as they did. They just sort of happened, he said.

''It sort of compares to getting called into heaven and having the big man put you on a higher level than himself,'' Mitchell remembers. ``That's not supposed to happen.''

Of course, Pac-Man isn't supposed to succumb to the perfect game, either. And one person -- a South Florida restaurant owner, no less -- isn't supposed to dominate the entire video game world. The perfect game may have been Mitchell's greatest gaming feat, but it wasn't his first. He also holds records for the other most popular arcade titles of the early '80s: Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Burger Time and Centipede -- he once kept one worm alive for 47 hours straight.

''Billy's the star,'' says record-keeper Day. ``He's Superman.''

That may be a stretch, but to many people Mitchell is a hero. Rarely a day goes by, he says, where he isn't recognized from his appearances on MTV, the Discovery Channel and NBC's Dateline, among other places.

No, Mitchell's no wrestler. But, in video game circles, he might as well be Hulk Hogan.

e lying,'' he says, smiling, ``if I told you it wasn't fun.''

BACK

Beleve me or not but i met billy mitchell few month ago in a MIAMI food show , he is really nice and of course we talk about is PAC-MAN record .....