On a blustery fall afternoon in the dark confines of The D-Pad, a console gaming center in Palm Harbor, Todd Rogers is playing Robotron on a big-screen TV. Forty years old, with a gut that spills over his belt buckle and a ponytail that extends to his lower back, he might be taken for a loner stuck in adolescence.
But there's something about him that counters that impression — something about the intensity with which he plays. Nearby, a young guy lounges on a futon, playing the uber-hot Halo 2 online while talking on a headset with someone probably far away. Rogers' approach is markedly different: He sits bolt upright, staring at the cartoonish graphics of an '80s Atari game, his hand furiously flicking the joystick. His thumbs are worked to exhaustion and the pit stains on his shirt are spreading by the second.
Todd Rogers isn't merely good at videogames; by some calculations he is the best player ever. Granted, he achieved that status by setting hundreds of world records in games from a different era, in titles like Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac Man (1980 version), Ms. Pac Man, Asteroids (Game 1), Gorf and four different types of Berzerk. But retro videogames are making a comeback, and Rogers, who lives with his parents and teenage son in Brooksville, may be looking at an uptick in his profile.
Rogers would tell you he doesn't need to break out. He already is the biggest, the baddest, the best. And he's quick to list his other achievements, too: among them that he once nailed a high-profile porn star; that his max bench press was 460; and that his sense of smell is seven times more acute than the average person's.
"I definitely have not led a dull life," he says with a wry chuckle.
True enough. But it's also been a life burdened by its share of tough times. His wife committed suicide in 2001. He was a passenger in a car accident in the early '90s that busted him up so bad he flatlined for 28 seconds. Rogers has held a string of jobs — in construction, as a telemarketer, a repo man and a skip tracer, among others — but nothing has really stuck.
You wonder whether his excellence in the world of gaming has prevented him from turning his peculiar brand of genius into something more productive. You wonder, ultimately, why video games?
Rogers isn't wondering. "I'd do it all over again," he says. "The people that I've met … the pussy. When I was younger, I had companies actually paying me to play videogames. How much better can it get?"
Rogers' favorite achievement involves the game Dragster. From 1980 to 1982, as a high school kid in suburban Chicago, he worked at cajoling the two-dimensional car across a TV screen faster and faster, experimenting with different joystick techniques. He kept sending his times to Activision, the manufacturer, which pumped up its new Dragster wunderkind in its newsletters. When he submitted a time of 5.51 seconds in 1982, Rogers got a phone call from Activision. "How exactly did you do it?" a staffer pressed. Rogers told him that he'd manipulated the joystick to engage the clutch before the start. Activision was incredulous. You see, the game's designer had computer-tested Dragster and determined the fastest time to be 5.54. Todd Rogers had done the impossible.
Rogers has managed far weirder feats. Last year, he played Journey Escape, a 1982 videogame built around the antics of the rock band Journey, for 85 hours and 46 minutes in his Brooksville bedroom. It's believed to be the longest gaming marathon ever. "First, I wanted to beat the high score," Rogers says, his basso voice still inflected with a Chicago accent. "Then I wanted to surpass my longest time of playing a game, 72 hours [of Wormwopper in '84]; then I wanted to see what would happen after a hundred million points. Would it roll back to zero or keep going?"
When he finally passed out on the floor, the screen read 105,779,605. During the saga, he consumed fruit and air-temperature water, and pissed in a Burger King cup. Although he taped it all on 14 videocassettes, it did not earn an official record. Why? Because he did not get drug-tested.
Rogers claims to currently hold 2,045 high scores. Twin Galaxies, the definitive clearinghouse for videogame tallies, officially credits him with 293, placing him No. 2 on its Top World Record Holders list. Walter Day, founder and head of Twin Galaxies, says that his verification process is exhaustive, and that much of Rogers' documentation has been in limbo since a staffer abruptly left the job. "Ultimately," Day says, "he'll be No. 1 on that list by a pretty good margin."
Rogers has little interest in today's games. "Games like Halo, they seem so temporary," he says. "I don't know; maybe I think they're too easy."
"He has the ability and the skills to master modern games," says Day, 55, who started Twin Galaxies as an arcade in the early '80s. "But I don't think he has the inclination."
Videogaming is a tech-driven activity that can render a new title obsolete in less than a year. So what good is an old fart with a cache of ancient Atari gear and a bunch of decades-old records? Answer: Nostalgia.
The new games are unquestionably hot, of course. A Research and Markets report said that in 2003 the average American spent 75 hours playing videogames, twice that of 1997 — only Internet usage is growing faster. This year's rollout of Halo 2 out-grossed that week's top movie, The Incredibles.
But manufacturers are also reissuing vintage games, packaging several on a CD for use on new platforms like X-Box and Gamecube. Day has a theory why retro games have endured: They're more challenging than the new ones. "It takes a thousand times more time and work to be the best at Ms. Pac Man than to be the best at Halo 2," he asserts. "There are layers and layers of phenomena, and many more 'aha' points in the [old] games. You have to know so many levels of behavioral patterns; it takes years of study to reach that peak plateau."
If that sounds like just another old fart talking, consider this e-mail from 27-year-old gaming champ Zack Hample. "I like retro games because the emphasis is placed on the player's skill rather than the programmers' skill. … Old games, despite their simplicity, seem to have more nuance, which is why they take longer to master."
So what exactly is it that makes Rogers and his ilk so good? "Analyzation," he says blithely. "You look at the screen more in terms of a computer programmer. The average person looks at a game as entertainment. I ask, 'What are its limitations? What new can I bring to it?' I want to bring the computer to its knees."
Day weighs in: "It takes numerous qualities: exemplary hand-eye coordination and mind-body coordination, but the most important thing is that great players have this deep intuitive understanding of the game. They see patterns and systems in the game that escapes a lesser player."
There are currently a handful of gamers making six-figure money in tournament winnings and sponsorships, says Day, most playing hot titles like Halo and John Madden NFL Football, with their splashy graphics and real-life tableau.
But classic gaming will have a genuine world championship soon, he predicts, "when the publicity-driven sponsorship companies recognize how much media coverage they'll get supporting such a classic contest. There'd be tremendous interest in guys duking it out in Donkey Kong. When old games start attracting sponsorship money, our friend Todd could clean up."
If video gamers are thought of as nerds with pocket protectors, stoned slackers or pimple-faced teens, Todd Rogers shatters the molds. He's brash, bragadocious, a shit-talker who likes to shock, tweak and provoke. He speaks in profanity-laced verbal fusillades, his mouth racing ahead of his mind, routinely digressing into conversational cul-de-sacs.
During a handful of interviews, Rogers tells me that his martial arts skills once motivated him to register with the police as a lethal weapon; that in 1991 he got a speeding ticket for going 158 in a 50 in his new Corvette; that he nearly landed a part in the movie The Alamo, but the producers finally told him that he was 100 pounds too heavy; that he would like to meet Marilyn Manson; and that he definitely does not like to get flicked off ("I've broken plenty of middle fingers; it tweaks me the wrong way").
He grew up in Bridgeview, Ill., 26 miles southwest of Chicago. The family was trademark middle class — his father a supervisor for the Chicago Transit Authority, his mother a homemaker. He was the youngest of three brothers and a sister.
"Todd was a handful," says his mother Marion with a smile, standing in the windy parking lot outside The D-Pad while her son is inside putting on gaming displays. "If I had him first, I wouldn't have had anymore. I tell him that all the time."
Rogers admits he was devilish. During neighborhood snowball fights, he'd break out a special stash he'd stored in the freezer, "so I could nail 'em with an [ice ball] and knock 'em in the dirt."
He recalls getting stung by a bee when he was 4 or 5. That motivated him to collect spiders — "it was retaliation; I'd feed the bees to them" — a hobby he continues to this day with a collection of about 40.
As a kid he played a little Pong, but the watershed moment came in 1977 when his father brought home an Atari system. That gave rise to family and neighborhood contests. Todd quickly grew bored of whuppin' ass one-on-one, and set his sights on the record books. In the pre-Internet era, he had to satisfy himself with seeing his name in newsletters and magazines.
He began conquering game after game. The local media took an interest. A Chicago TV crew shot footage of him at his graduation; their story dubbed him the class "videodictorian." By that time, companies like Atari and Activision were having him appear at conventions, paying him $1,000 a day for four days. He made money penning reviews of games for video magazines and other sponsor-related activities. The gravy train lasted a couple of years; he reckons his best year netted him about $35,000 in game-related income.
Rogers never quite became a golden boy of gaming, in large part because he wouldn't kiss the necessary asses — and because of his mouth. He recounts a time that he was working for Atari at a trade show: "I had the runs, so I asked this guy, 'Will you watch my booth while I take a dump? I got the runs.' When I got back a lady gave me a nasty look. 'Do you know who that was? That was the president of Atari.' I said, 'Hey, he either watches my spot or mops up my spot.'"
By mid-decade, the videogame craze had tapered off. And when fighting games came into vogue a few years later, Rogers couldn't develop the same passion for them. In 1990, he moved to Brooksville with his family and effectively bagged his gaming career.
In '93, he met a woman named Lori who reminded him of a thicker-framed Demi Moore. From the start, Rogers — who doesn't smoke, do drugs and rarely drinks — saw his future wife, a substance abuser, as something of a reclamation case.
He married Lori despite her problems, but the rescue effort was doomed. On Jan. 26, 2001, she committed suicide by overdosing on muscle relaxers.
Rogers, who had moved in with his parents by then, says he never stopped loving her: "I always thought I could save her." But however deeply her death affected him, he doesn't let his feelings show. He will say that, on some level, the end of their relationship led to his return to the world of games. Not long before she died, her son from a previous marriage taunted Rogers about being a videogame relic. This sparked him into action. He logged onto the Internet and found a picture of himself, then came upon the Twin Galaxies website. It credited him with only one world record, for the arcade game Gorf.
Rogers then set about researching his high scores and submitted five pounds of documentation to Walter Day at Twin Galaxies. He was back in the gamer game.
He has no plans to make a living at it; that would mean mastering new games and entering tournaments. But he would like to see some action in the nostalgia realm. Rogers is currently in negotiations with WTOG-Ch. 44 to present a retro segment on its show Tampa Bay Gamers Unleashed (6 p.m. Saturdays). And you never know when the urge will strike and he'll cook up another marathon or run for the record books.
As far as that retro-gaming championship that Walter Day foresees —- would he be inclined to enter?
"Would there be money involved?" Rogers asks. "Sure, why not? It's easy pickin's."
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.