So, something that's been on my mind lately is high scores. As you all know, there's no go-to / universal site for high scores on the internet. And for a while now, people have been asking me to add high scores to speedrun.com, however I don't particularly want to do this because high scores are not what the name "speedrun dot com" implies.

So I started looking at the alternatives. There are existing sites rivalling Twin Galaxies, such as Cyberscore and highscore.com, and while some have significant databases of records, none of them are quite what I think is needed right now, and that is a centralised high score website, where records wouldn't be verified by a higher team of moderators, but rather by moderators of game, pretty much the same way it works here on speedrun.com. This site would ideally collaborate / pool data from the existing alternatives to Twin Galaxies, and I believe if it's done right, it could become the most reputable high score site, and could even incur a surge in popularity of high score attempts, and streaming them on Twitch.

I would be willing to build such a site, or at least, if we could get a team together, collaborate and direct its development.

One issue however, is the name. Of all of the existing sites, one that really caught my eye is highscore.com. What a perfect domain name that is. I actually reached out to the owner in January and said all of the above, and offered to buy his domain name for a certain amount of money. He declined, adding that he's not currently interested in selling it (and that if he were, that amount doesn't come close to what the domain is worth), adding however, that he would be willing to consider collaboration / cross-promotion. We chatted a little back and forth throwing some ideas around, but nothing has yet been decided.

However, I'm not sure if I'm personally up for that, or if it would even work out. I feel like in order to see this through fully, then I need full control / ownership of it.

Last week, I was chatting to one of the head admins of Cyberscore, and mentioned all of the above. We had an informal chat, and basically, they would be very up for helping out / pooling / sharing data if this were to happen, which is good to know.

So, I'm now left with 4 options:

1. Add high scores to speedrun.com.

2. Work with the owner of highscore.com to try to improve the existing site.

3. Try again to buy highscore.com (offering more money), make a completely new website in its place, while trying to salvage as much of the existing data as possible.

4. Make a completely new high scores website under a different name / domain name.

Personally I would like to try option 3, but I'd like to get all of your opinions on what you think should be done, so please leave a comment with any thoughts or ideas you have.

Note: We wouldn't necessarily be expecting the same people to moderate on both potential sites, and a speedrun.com implementation would need discussion.