John Bates has no time for spares.
When the 85-year-old retiree plays a virtual bowling game on the Nintendo Wii, any score short of 300 will not do.
"If I get five or six strikes and then a spare, I quit that game," he said.
That quest for perfection has landed Bates in the Guinness World Records 2011 Gamer's Edition for "Most Perfect Scores Achieved on Wii Sports Bowling".
The official record? A whopping 2850 perfect games.
Encouraged by friends Richard and Lynn Bott, the retired school principal caught the Wii bug in 2008.
It took him a year to nail his first perfect score in bowling.
Then came the turning point: tapping into his ambidexterity.
"I'm right-handed but can bowl equally well with either hand," Bates said.
"My son got me using two hands under the ball. I got up from 22% strikes to nearly 90%."
Unlike most of his Guinness peers - including a man with 5400 items of Super Mario memorabilia - Bates is hardly obsessive.
He never has Wii-bowled more than 21 games in a day. (At about 4 minutes per game, that's less than 1 hours.) He bakes and cooks for himself, goes to church most mornings, bikes when the weather allows and, yes, plays "regular" bowling, where he rolled a 594 series recently.
His best score at the alleys is a 281, but at the Wii console, Bates is now up to 3200 perfect games.
And he welcomes all challengers.
"If you don't grip the remote and set up the cursor just right, it doesn't work," he said.
"It's not as simple as it sounds."
