Classic arcade gamer tops famous Seinfeld Frogger high score

While released in 1981, classic arcade game Frogger perhaps gained it's greatest fame many years later in an April 1998 episode of Seinfeld, where character George Costanza discovered his old high score still existed on an original Frogger machine at his old hangout, and tried his best to save the machine and his score.

860,630 was the fictional score the plot of this episode of Seinfeld, now a classic in and of itself, centered around.  At the time, this score was considered lofty and almost humorous by fans of classic arcade video gaming, as it was more than double any known documented score ever seen on a real Frogger machine.

However, the "Costanza Score" still managed to become a true holy grail by those still chasing high score records on the classic arcade games, so much so that in 2005, Twin Galaxies, the official scorekeepers for video gaming records both classic and modern, offered a cash prize to any gamer who could break the score set in a fictional New York deli.  Nobody was able to claim the prize by the December 31, 2005 deadline.

In 2009, two gamers began to create the idea that reaching this score was in fact possible, as New Hampshire's Donald Hayes and Connecticut's Pat Laffaye both began not only a battle with one another over the number one spot in Twin Galaxies all-time rankings, but with the fictional character who was still brought up in conversations with either of them.

No more should that be a factor.  As the ball dropped on New Years Day on the East Coast, Twin Galaxies announced that Pat Laffaye has obtained the holy grail on the classic Frogger machine, upping his own official World Record score but also finally topping the famous Seinfeld score as well, landing 896,980 points on an orginal Frogger machine, as verified by Twin Galaxies official Eric Akeson.

Word on the street has not yet hit poor George, but perhaps this column is a start in making it so.

Congrats to Pat on obtaining one of the remaining holy grail marks in classic arcade gaming and forever placing your name into the conversations about "that Seinfeld episode" from over a decade ago.