Battling a bloody finger from a broken controller, Canadian Dwayne Richard placed third Tuesday at the Pac-Man World Championship in New York.
The 38-year-old from Grande Prairie, Alta., battled Pinky, Inky, Blinky and Clyde as well as nine other finalists at the competition titled the Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship, presented by Quiznos.
Mexico's Carlos Daniel Borrego, 27, won the event, defeating an Austrian rival. His reward included a free Quiznos sub each week for the next 26 years, 100,000 Microsoft points to be spent in the Xbox Live marketplace and a one-of-a-kind Xbox 360 console inspired by Pac-Man and autographed by game creator Toru Iwatani.
Richard was just 6,000 points from making the final.
"If my finger wasn't bleeding and I wasn't in pain, I probably would have done it because during the other qualifying matches I kept finishing second and third," Richard explained from New York. "But my scores started getting lower because my finger started bleeding."
Richard is in the midst of his master's degree in theology at Vancouver's Regent College. He's no stranger to video game competition, making his mark as one of the world's best on classic arcade titles.
He's an old-school gamer, gripping the Xbox controller like a joystick rather than using his thumb. On Tuesday, that style took its toll.
But despite the injury, Richard had no complaints.
"Oh no, I'm stoked. Getting a free trip to play video games?"
Richard also won a bunch of Microsoft points and a slew of submarine sandwiches - either $1,500 or $3,000, he couldn't remember which - plus a couple extra days in New York.
"If I have to explain to my parents why I did what I did, this is what it was all for. I got all my quarters back now," he said.
Richard can take pride in the fact that he recorded the highest score of the day -- 252,000. The winner's highest score was 251,000.
"But when it came to playing head-to-head, I fell a little bit short," he said.
The tournament took place in an old theatre with the competitors playing on Xbox 360 consoles, with their games shown on huge TV screens while the gamers played on a smaller high-definition TV.
They were the first to play a new version of the Pac-Man game, called Pac-Man Championship Edition, billed as featuring the first new Pac-Man mazes in 26 years. The new game is available for download on Xbox Live Arcade as of 5 a.m. ET Wednesday.
The 10 finalists were the cream of the crop from 30,000 players in 25 countries who competed in online preliminaries on Xbox Live in early May. The survivors came from eight countries: Austria, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
