This granny gamer set world records against players half her age
Doris Self is crushing, well into her 70s
No competitive gamer wants to lose to an old lady. But Doris Self didn’t give a darn. Playing Q*Bert helped her sleep.
The octogenarian was listed in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records for oldest competitive video gamer. She had played her last game of Q*Bert the prior year, at age 80. Two decades earlier, she held a world record for high score.
Self happened upon the arcade world by pure chance. Her husband of 32 years had just died, so her daughter offered to take her to a movie to pass the time. Afterward, they headed to Chuck E. Cheese for some pizza. It was the crest of the golden age of arcade gaming, yet Self had never seen a console until that evening.
“Mom, come over here. I think you’ll get a kick out of this,” Self recalled her daughter saying. “Famous last words. There I went.”
Soon, she found a 24-hour arcade near her Florida home, only it was too busy and loud during the day. So, she began a routine of starting her first game around 11 p.m., sometimes playing until the sun rose the following morning. The young, mostly male gamers she did meet were amused and benevolent. “Everybody wanted to adopt me,” she told The Boston Globe in 2005. “They couldn’t have been nicer.” Sometimes she’d even play the hustler. “They got to the point where they’d trick kids to play against me,” Self remembered.
That’s when she fell in love with Q*Bert.
The title character, Q*Bert, is a boppy, armless orange creature. A player must hop Q*Bert along a pattern of cubes; each hop changes a cube’s color, with the goal of changing the entire board, while avoiding a host of tricky little alien enemies.
On July 1, 1984, at Twin Galaxies’ Video Game Masters Tournament, Self scored 1,112,300 points on the game’s most difficult setting. She had set the world record at 58 years old, making her both the high scorer and the oldest competitive player.
When asked how she got so good, amid a culture that considered young boys more clever and dexterous at gaming, she said simply, “I know younger kids memorize a certain pattern…I just play it by ear.”
Self would hold the title for only two years, however, she continued to play the game and remained active in the arcade community.
Some 20 years later, she decided to give the title another go. She had a chance to reclaim the oldest competitor spot, at least, from John Lawton, the 72-year-old founder of Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. In fact, that’s where the Video Game Championships were being held that year.
Over the years, Self had met and formed a friendship with Billy Mitchell, an arcade celebrity and devious record-holder for games like Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Mitchell not only offered to sponsor her flight to Funspot, he sent Self her own stand-up Q*Bert game to practice on in advance. (In the documentary King of Kong, she opens her front door, screams, claps her hands, and runs out to give Mitchell a hug.)
In her late seventies, Self dug back in for practice. Not everyone understood.
“The girls I play bridge with think I’m some kind of a nut going down to an arcade and playing with kids. ‘What’s the matter with you?’” she laughed in a 2005 CBS special.
At the Funspot championships, she met gamers who had traveled 3,000 miles to try their hands at high scores in a competitive setting. There, over a matter of days, competitors snuck glimpses at each other’s techniques and whispered digs behind their backs. During breaks, they pushed together tables and ate protein-packed food for energy. The walls were filmy with grease, the floor an eggy linoleum. Referees presided to keep score and note major accomplishments. “Doris is an exciting phenomenon,” one said, wearing his customary striped shirt. “What she’s done in practice has superseded her scores from 20-some years ago.”
Despite her practice, Self did not topple the Q*Bert high score, citing distraction from all the lights and cameras, but she was once again named the world’s oldest competitive gamer.
When CBS asked her if she was done, she gasped, “No! 3 o’clock in the morning when I can’t sleep, I come out and play Q*Bert. It’s wonderful.”
The following year, in 2006, Self died from injuries sustained in a car accident. She was 81 years old.
She still holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive videogamer.
