Scott Safran
Scott Safran (February 3, 1967 - March 27, 1989) was a Cherry Hill, New Jersey resident most famous for setting the world record score on the arcade game Asteroids at the age of 15.
Background
He was born to Frann Safran in Cherry Hill, New Jersey some time in 1967. As a teenager, he became interested in baseball, guitars, Grateful Dead, and eventually arcade games. He was determined to break a world record on an arcade game, finally settling on Asteroids. He practiced throughout 1981 and 1982, eventually being able to carry a single game for nearly twenty hours at his local 7-Eleven convenience store.
World record
After hearing of a charity event to raise money towards research on muscular dystrophy in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Safran became interested in helping out, and agreed to "marathon" a game of asteroids. The event was held at the All-American Billiard Arcade on November 13, 1982. Leo Daniels, a North Carolina actor, held the world record at the time, with 40,901,010 points. Safran managed to continue his game for an astonishing eighty-one hours, occasionally stopping for food or bathroom breaks. He stopped the game voluntarily after this extended period of time and went home with his parents. His score was 41,336,440 points, a record that still stands to this day, as well as the longest-standing world record in arcade history.
Death
Safran graduated from Cherry Hill High School in 1985. He owned two cats, which he named Sampson and Delilah and moved into an apartment in Los Angeles, California. On March 27, 1989, Safran was killed at the age of 21 after falling six stories from his apartment balcony while trying to get his cat Sampson off the roof. He was buried a week later. The cat went back inside the apartment and was unharmed, ironically.
Search for Safran
Unaware of Safran's death, Walter Day, an arcade referee who headed Twin Galaxies (the official arcade scoreboard of the world, operating in Fairfield, Iowa) attempted to track down Safran in 1998 following the re-release of Asteroids. Day could not locate Safran, and asked newspapers and radios to ask people to help find him. Day personally offered a thousand dollars to whomever could locate Safran. Eventually, in April 2002, Day phoned Safran's family and learned of Scott's death. In May 2002, a posthumous award ceremony was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to honor him. His achievement has been compared to Bob Beamon's long jump or Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak.