Scott Safran

Background

Scott was born to Mitch and Frann Safran in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. As a teenager, he became interested in baseball, guitars, the 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 for much of 1982, and was eventually able to carry a single game for nearly twenty hours at his local 7-Eleven convenience store, his first attempt to beat the existing world record. On November 13, 1982, at All-American Billiard Co. in Newtown, Pennsylvania, he again attempted to set a new world record for a single game of Asteroids and he succeeded. The game lasted approximately 60 hours. His final score was 41,336,440.

Death

Scott graduated from Cherry Hill High School West in 1985 and moved to an apartment in Los Angeles, California in 1987. On March 27, 1989, Scott died after falling three stories while trying to rescue his cat, Samson, from a ledge of his apartment building.

Unaware of Safran's death, Walter Day, an arcade referee who led 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 whoever could locate Safran. Eventually, in April 2002, Day made contact with Safran's sister, Marci, and learned of Scott's death. In May 2002, a posthumous award ceremony was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to honor him and family members received the award on his behalf.