Every time someone breaks the Donkey Kong record, you think this one is for keeps. It seems amazing that anyone can still improve this game’s high score.

According to Twin Galaxies, the official site for arcade player rankings, the World Record on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong has changed hands for the third time this year, as former champion Steve Wiebe climbs back into the top spot with a score of 1,064,500 points.

“Wiebe last held the Donkey Kong record in spring of 2007, only to be bested by his movie rival Billy Mitchell months later.  Mitchell’s score fell to New York’s Hank Chien in March of this year, but the Florida hot sauce distributor regained the title on July 31 with a score of 1,062,800 points”, says the article on Twin Galaxies.

1,064,500 points seems like an amazing score. I wonder how long it’s going to last.

A while ago I broke the 3rd and last glass in a set I really liked. Now I need new, cool, drinking glasses, and these look just perfect!

These are pint-sized Atari Arcade Glasses. Relive the best days of your life, the days when pure joy was just a high score away and you could save the world for a mere twenty-five cents.

This set of four pint glasses features artwork from four classic Atari games: Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest, and Missile Command. Drink your orange juice at breakfast with Asteroids, enjoy a cold refreshing soda at lunch with Centipede, and then throw back a couple brews with your Player 2 in the evening with Tempest and Missile Command. It may not be the old days, but life is still pretty damn good.

“By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorized minions.”

“We reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act. If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction.”

The site added these paragraphs as an April Fool’s joke, but it serves as yet another proof for something we all know – no one reads the EULA. Due to the fact that 7,500 people didn’t tick the box, GameStation believes as many as 88% of people do not read the terms and conditions of a website before they make a purchase.

The site doesn’t intend to activate the clause, and will send e-mails to the customers, nullifying the claim on their souls.

Jim Greer, CEO and co-founder of Kongregate, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. It was extremely interesting and Greer supplied some fascinating facts. Here are the highlights from the chat:

First, the stats

Kongregate has 8.5 million unique visitors per month and logs 21 million hours played per month. The site’s 95% peak bandwidth usage from the datacenter is 75Mbps, but that’s just for html. All of the site’s assets are delivered through an Akamai CDN.

As for money matters, Greer says the site is breaking even, and should become profitable this year:

We’ve done 3 rounds of funding totalling $9M. The first was an angel round led by Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn and investor in Facebook, Flickr, Last.FM, among others. Then an VC firm called Greylock invested $5M – they are also investors in Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Pandora, Zipcar, Redfin, Redhat, etc. A then Jeff Bezos put in $3M. This was his personal money, not Amazon’s…

Kongregate currently employs 21 people.

The Man Behind the Site

Greer, 39, was a game developer, then web game developer, then web site developer. He worked at Origin, Shockwave.com, and Pogo. You can see his read his resume here. He also co-designed and programmed an RTS called Netstorm. His favorite games on Kongregate are:

• Fancy Pants 1 & 2
• Remnants of Skystone
• The Company of Myself
• Particles (simple!)
• The Bloons series
• Portal the Flash Version

The Feminine Side

As a woman and a gamer (not necessarily in that order…) I was very interested about the status of female gamers on Kongregate. Greer answered my question and reported that only 10% of the registered users in Kongregate are female. Their favorite games are:

• GemCraft chapter 0
• Music Catch 2
• GemCraft
• Bloons Tower Defense 4
• Bloons Tower Defense 3
• Desktop Tower Defense 1.5
• Zilch
• Protector III
• Factory Balls 2
• Desktop TD Pro

This is very interesting, since you can see that women don’t play only “casual” games, but go for more hardcore types, such as tower defense games.

Game Developers

When asked if game developers can actually make a living off of the games in the site, Greer said:

Some of the virtual goods games are on track to do $500K-$1M total revenue this year. Among single player games there are lots of developers making tens of thousands of dollars in their share of ad revenue. And that’s just on Kongregate – definitely possible to make a living on flash games, though not easy.

iPad and Flash

Greer obviously isn’t happy with the lack of Flash support on the iPad. He explains that HTML 5 is great for video and it’s easy to convert a Flash video, but it’s not easy to convert a Flash game or app into javascript.

This is great if you’re trying to, say, sell games in an app store. It sucks if you are a game player or Flash game developer (of which there are many). I’m all for new formats, like Unity, but it sucks to shut out so much great stuff.