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Tech

Twin Galaxies: A Chat With Walter Day

From the minute Donkey Kong stomped apart his first ladder, there have been hordes of individuals (most of the them male) clambering over one another for alpha dog status.

The world of competitive gaming is hardly a recent phenomenon. From the minute Donkey Kong stomped apart his first ladder, there have been hordes of individuals (most of the them male) clambering over one another for alpha dog status; using theoretical mathematics to game the system, disputing the authenticity of their nemeses high-score videos, and generally taking video games about a million times more seriously than most of us considered possible.

Walter Day has spent the last three decades enabling this insane behavior. In 1981 he opened Twin Galaxies, a video arcade in small-town Iowa that morphed overnight into the center of the gaming universe and the official hall of records for games from Frogger all the way up to Wii Fitness. But serving as referee and scorekeeper to the world’s gamers is only a sideline to Walter’s real interest: Transcendental Meditation as taught by the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.