Caitlin Oliver Just Broke the World Record High Score for the Arcade Game Splatterhouse

So far as I can tell from her interview, Caitlin Oliver isn’t deaf, dumb or blind, but she sure plays a mean Splatterhouse.

Okay, that’s the one joke about rock opera I’ve never seen that I get for the year, now I’ll actually talk about the record.

“I first got my hands on Splatterhouse as a young girl,” she told Patrick Scott Patterson. “My father picked up a TurboGrafx-16 for me one lucky Christmas and he was always good about letting me pick out a game to rent for the weekend at the local video rental stores. Once I got it home I was totally hooked. Gross monsters, corpses, skeletons; it had it all… I was a pretty weird little girl.”

But it wasn’t until a friend’s suggestion that she decided to try and earn a new world record high score in the game at her local arcade. Breaking the record (which she actually did twice during last Saturday’s live internet broadcast, reaching a record busting 405,100 on her first try but carrying on with another try of 493,700) puts her in a league with Doris Self, who at the age of 58 set what was, at the time, a world record setting score in Q*Bert.

“The first time I finished, when I initially topped [previous record holder Anthony Paparo]’s score, I thought my heart was going to pound straight through my chest,” she said. “It was possibly the most intense rush of adrenaline I’ve ever felt in my life. It was unreal to have decided to work to accomplish something and proceed to become the best in the world at something. Utterly incredible feeling. I nearly ran outside for a cigarette afterwards.”

But Oliver doesn’t think her record setting days are over: Altered Beast might just be next.

(Patrick Scott Patterson via Kotaku.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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