A professional YouTuber in Queensland has been ordered to pay $350,000 plus interest and costs to the former world record score holder for Donkey Kong, after the Brisbane district court found the YouTuber had defamed him “recklessly” with false claims of a link between a lawsuit and another YouTuber’s suicide.
William “Billy” Mitchell, an American gamer who had held world records in Donkey Kong and Pac-Man going back to 1982, as recognised by the Guinness World Records and the video game database Twin Galaxies, brought the case against Karl Jobst, seeking $400,000 in general damages and $50,000 in aggravated damages.
Jobst, who makes videos about “speed running” (finishing games as fast as possible), as well as gaming records and cheating in games, made a number of allegations against Mitchell in a 2021 YouTube video. He accused Mitchell of cheating, and “pursuing unmeritorious litigation” against others who had also accused him of cheating, the court judgment stated.
The court heard Mitchell was accused in 2017 of cheating in his Donkey Kong world records by using emulation software instead of original arcade hardware. Twin Galaxies investigated the allegation, and subsequently removed Mitchell’s scores and banned him from participating in its competitions.
The Guinness World Records disqualified Mitchell as a holder of all his records – in both Donkey Kong and Pac-Man – after the Twin Galaxies decision.
The judgment stated that Jobst’s 2021 video also linked the December 2020 suicide of another YouTuber, Apollo Legend, to “stress arising from [his] settlement” with Mitchell, and wrongly asserted that Apollo Legend had to pay Mitchell “a large sum of money”.
The judgment noted multiple versions of the video were published, with the allegations removed or addressed, before Jobst issued a retraction video in July 2021, two months after the original. The first video was viewed by more than 500,000 people, including 200,000 in Australia, the court heard.
Judge Ken Barlow found Jobst had made five defamatory imputations about Mitchell, including that Mitchell had required Apollo Legend pay him a large sum of money and thus implying he “in essence, hounded Apollo Legend to death”.
Barlow found this was “based on a fallacy” – and that Jobst, in not making further inquiries before publishing the video, had been “recklessly indifferent” to if it was true.
Jobst denied the imputations had been made in the video. He argued Mitchell had a pre-existing bad reputation because he had been previously exposed as a cheat, the court heard.
Barlow found Mitchell did have an existing reputation as a cheat and for suing people who alleged he was a cheat, and found that Mitchell had expressed joy when he believed – incorrectly – on an earlier occasion that Apollo Legend may have died. But Barlow found Jobst had severely damaged Mitchell’s reputation and caused distress.
He described Jobst as having a “self-aggrandising and perhaps self-protective tendency not to admit error and not to back down once he has taken a stance”.
Barlow framed Jobst’s actions as a “crusade” against Mitchell, stating that he was trying to “[show] his audience that he is the knight who slew the Mitchell dragon”.
The judgment summary noted that the court was not called on to decide, and did not decide, if Mitchell had cheated in his world record scores.
The court awarded Mitchell $300,000 in damages for non-economic loss, and an additional $50,000 in aggravated damages due to Jobst’s publishing the video twice, mocking Mitchell’s complaint about it, failing to apologise and withdraw the allegations, and his “clear malice” towards Mitchell.
Jobst was ordered to pay more than $40,000 in interest on the damages from the date of publication, as well as Mitchell’s costs.
Mitchell had previously sued Twin Galaxies in the US in a case which settled in January 2024. As part of the settlement, Twin Galaxies published a statement that Mitchell had “produced expert opinion that the game play on the tapes of Mr Mitchell’s record game plays could depict play on an original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to the degradation of components”.
The company said it would reinstate all of Mitchell’s previous scores on its website’s official historical database, and remove the dispute thread about Mitchell’s records. Mitchell’s Guinness World Records were also reinstated in June 2020.