Michael Weinreb, writing at Grantland:

Over that time, he lost a sizable chunk of his Q*bert reserve, but he woke up and built back his army, fending off red balls and purple snakes and green gremlins, hopping from square to square, changing the colors on the pyramid in a game that often feels like the residue of a bad psilocybin trip when you try to play it for 10 minutes, let alone until your synapses foment a revolution against themselves. He lay down under the Roller Disco machine roughly every eight to nine hours, snoozing peacefully and restoring himself to life until he’d broken the all-time high score, and then, because he knew a man in a Florida garage was simultaneously chasing after the same record he’d just broken, he kept going, past 70 hours, into territory that no upright arcade gamer had ever approached.

Fascinating story, especially for us 80’s nerds.