Apart from business deals between game producing companies, there have been players who not just appealed against exclusion on websites with high score lists, but actually filed lawsuits against such board owners and individuals posting there who showed these players had cheated.
You may wonder what is the point, is there any monetary issue involved? Is it purely about status?
The laws regarding defamation (slander and libel, spoken and written respectively) vary per country. The UK used to be really bad in the sense that you could be found guilty of defamation even when stating something that is true but which affected a person’s business! This is insane and it was one of the reasons why the truth doesn’t always come out.
An example of this are various statements about the origins of the computer game Elite from the 1980s (originally on the BBC microcomputer, later ported to various other systems, and from which evolved later games such as Frontier: Elite 2, and Frontier: First encounters, which were found to be incorrect, misleading, but made by one of the 2 authors of this game. As this author is litigious, those who knew better were hesitant to correct the statements in public… You can read a bit more about this on the page “Elite: Claims about numbers of copies sold, the manual, and the origins of Elite”.
The case that is currently in the news is also related to classic (1980s) computer games, namely the lawsuits of Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell against in particular the website/highs core database “Twin galaxies”. The latter also filed lawsuits against various people who just made posts of videos about this topic.
You may want to have a look at the following page which describes the MItchell case in more detail and has links to the relevant sites with evidence of the cheating: Similarities between Nxivm/K.Raniere and Twin galaxies/Billy Mitchell (King of Kong).
I will give a summary here: Mitchell’s scores in the game Donkey Kong had been distrusted by some people, and the players who achieved similar scores as he did years later, realised that they had to employ different strategies. The ones Mitchell used were too high risk, you would not be able to play like that and expect to survive long enough to get a high score.
This was at first mostly a feeling of ‘something is not right, he is too risky’ but this changed a few years ago, when someone sent information to one of the members of the website “Donkey Kong forum”, which was to look at the transition screens of the game in detail. This person likely suspected Mitchell used an emulator and then started looking for differences between the rendering of the game on screen by the actual arcade machine, and that which in particular the emulator MAME used, and then actually found such differences. MAME used a screen buffer which would be written to the screen of the PC in one go. In the actual arcade game there is no buffer, screen memory is the same as the main memory, and the screen memory is read out and sent to the monitor interleaved with memory access by the arcade machine. This means that there is an interaction between writing into the screen memory, and the reading of the video memory by the video controller, which can happen such that writes to memory are not shown until a frame later because the writes are done in a section of memory which the video controller has already passed, whereas if the buffer is dumped at the end of each frame to the PC video screen, the sections that were written while the arcade video controller was already further ahead will still be shown there because the screen memory (or intermediate buffer in the emulator) is read out in one go after all the micro processor’s actions, including writing to the screen memory, during that frame has been done. This was shown to create different artefacts in partially drawn structures that differed between the real machine and the emulator. It was then apparent that all of Mitchell’s videos all showed clear instances of artefacts that you would only find on the emulator…
And so he got removed from the high score boards of Twin galaxies, and only his highest known to be real (and quite old) score remained on Donkey Kong forum’s list.
It was clear that he cheated, and yet Mitchell filed lawsuits against various people and the company behind Twin galaxies, and some people who own or posted on Donkey KOng forum, and various youtube video makers who commented on the cheating. Why? Does he have any chance to win? He wouldn’t be able to show financial damages, except perhaps to his business of selling ‘Hot sauce’ which quite possibly took a hit from the bad publicity. But except with the old and inane UK rules for slander and libel, this should not succeed anywhere.
Mitchell was considered a heel from the ‘documentary’ The King of Kong, but I think he played himself. He likely felt it no problem and considered it a fun part of having been portrayed as a heel, but this may have changed when the cheating was proven, and possibly that that affected his business.
In sports there are similar issues with athletes banned for using banned substances, or for being not a XX woman (intersex mixed XY and and XY DSD athletes) using the courts to sometimes overrule decisions that governing bodies can make (as in: “Are allowed to make”), but in sports there are real financial aspects, but this does not happen so much directly in the case of computer games players and high score lists.
In some other games there are also financial aspects as in sports, such as betting, where people are banned from casinos if they do ‘card counting’, and I suspect the same happens with betting sites where cheating is possible, for instance CasinoChan login whereas in other betting games such as horse racing or betting on outcomes of sports contests there isn’t normally a way to cheat at the game.