Is there any reason to believe that cheating is something that started recently?
Is there any reason to believe that the ROM loaded on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet is exactly the same?
Is there any reason to believe that the components on every single original Donkey Kong cabinet perform the same?
If you look at the sports world you have, more or less, the acceptance that cheating happens, the components change, training regimens change, etc. Professional baseball has comprehensive statistics dating back to the 1860s and the result is that people have divided the sport into eras, and when you compare players in different eras you don't look at the stats alone, you compare how they performed relative to their peers, etc.
A "high score" list that ignores the reality of change is worthless.
> Yes, based on literally thousands of hours of video footage.
Well that's fantastic! Probabilities can be established for all sorts of in-game occurrences and the probability of this dude's game being legit or not.
Not only that, but the gamer ability can then be separated from the randomness of the game on any particular play! Are all the high scores the result of aberrations in the game, or because the player is just that great???
Speedrunners are very well aware of all the probability based events of the games they play, as well as the odds of those events and any circumstances that can change them [0]. It's called 'luck manipulation'. Usually that's only really useful to tool assisted runs, but on occasion luck manip can be performed by human players.
Regardless, while those in-the-know can recognize that a good run would have been a record if not for an unlucky event, at the end of the day all that matters is your time (or score). Accounting for the randomness is part of the strategy aspect of the sport.
[0] People who speedrun a particular game will also know of any differences in those probabilities across all known versions of the game. These people have studied these games so deeply they usually know more about how they work than the people who made them.
Probabilities have been calculated from Billy's footage that shows his alleged arcade games rendering as MAME. His random hammer smashes give points way higher than the mean, suggesting he stitched save states in an emulator.
If I recall correctly from King of Kong, for at least some people they do inspect the machines to see if they are original. There are tons of rom hacks and modded machines.
I recall in the documentary that they came to inspect Steve Weibe's machine (I think there was controversy because they just came in to his garage and started looking without asking first and they didn't seem to give Billy the same scrutiny.)
If you look at the sports world you have, more or less, the acceptance that cheating happens, the components change, training regimens change, etc. Professional baseball has comprehensive statistics dating back to the 1860s and the result is that people have divided the sport into eras, and when you compare players in different eras you don't look at the stats alone, you compare how they performed relative to their peers, etc.
A "high score" list that ignores the reality of change is worthless.