By looking at the ground floor of Pat Laffaye's Westport home, it's easy to tell that he has kids. Toys are strewn across the floor, a Star Wars book rests by the wall and a Nintendo Wii is connected to the large TV. However, the full-size Frogger arcade game, circa 1981, in the adjacent storage room, doesn't belong to his kids. It belongs to their dad.

It's in that cramped storage room that Laffaye, already the world record-holder for the highest score in Frogger (as the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition can attest to), made history once again. He toppled the fictional score of 860,630 points set by George Costanza, the lovable loser from the sitcom Seinfeld.

Going through three lives on Frogger can take less than five minutes for an amateur. A typical session for Laffaye lasts at least five hours, and there's no pause button on the arcade unit. On Dec. 22, Laffaye was four hours in and had two lives left in what turned out to be his record-setting performance.

"Have you been playing this whole time?" his wife, Anna, asked him.

"Yeah," Laffaye said, distracted by what was happening on screen.

His wife replied with a simple, "OK."

"I've played only one game," he said to his

wife.

"Come up when you take a break," she said. "Chris [his best friend] just called and they're not going away [on vacation]."

"Why not?" asked Laffaye, with his hands still on the joystick.

"Their condo just burned down!" Anna said. Laffaye was still focusing on Frogger, and his wife told him she'll tell him more when he's done.

"Wow," Laffaye said. He thinks the news must have affected him because a couple minutes later he was down to his last life.

Speaking to himself, he fired himself up for the final stretch.

"I need 200,000 on my last guy. Let's do it!"

About an hour later, he did it with 896,980 points.

'The Frogger'

Although Frogger is ancient by the standards of today's rapidly progressing video games, it's lived on due to regular re-releases, including a popular appearance on the iPhone. In the game, a lone frog must cross a highway and then hop onto moving logs to make it back home to his lily pad. The graphics are basic and the sounds are bleeps and bloops.

"The game is elegantly simple at first glance," said Laffaye. "Just make a little frog cross a road and a river, what's so hard about that? However, its true difficultly is completely disguised in that there are at least a dozen ways to get killed."

The George Costanza score, which further elevated Frogger's standing in the realm of pop culture, was featured in season nine, episode 18 of Seinfeld, and first aired in April 1998. At the time, Seinfeld was the king of sitcoms. Any joke mentioned in the show would be remembered and repeated ad nausea by its devoted following, and such became the case with the episode titled "The Frogger."

In the show, Costanza (played by Jason Alexander), the neurotic, downtrodden co-star, was with his buddy, Jerry, at their old hang out that was soon to be closed. A Frogger arcade unit was in the back of the pizza parlor. The top score still belonged to Costanza.

"Oh, I was unstoppable," Costanza reminisced in the show. "Perfect combination of Mountain Dew and mozzarella. Just a right amount of grease on the joystick."

Laffaye was driven by his competitive nature to top the high score, even though he wasn't exactly sure how the score of 860,630 came to be in the minds of the writers of the show.

Andy Robin, a Stamford native who wrote Seinfeld episodes in Los Angeles during the '90s, isn't exactly certain of its origins either.

"I really don't remember," he said in a phone interview from his Rhode Island home. "Probably, we had the production people go around and find the real record, and we added a few thousand points to the record."

In this case, it was a few hundred thousand points. According to Robin, the reason Frogger was used in the episode was because one of the other writers had set a record on a unit in Queens, N.Y. He does remember that the episode came late in the season. At that point, all sorts of ideas are used to put together an episode.

"That was sort of scraped together," Robin said. "That was like a late night meal."

Robin was also a competitive gamer during the early '80s, which was the heyday of arcades. His game of choice was Pengo, a game featuring a red penguin that has to navigate through a maze while avoiding enemies. At the time, Robin held one of the top scores.

Speaking as a guy who likes video games, Robin thinks it is "pretty cool" that someone would aim to topple a score mentioned in passing on an episode that aired more than 10 years ago.

"It's all relative. I think that most people would call it a pointless, lazy man's use of time," said Robin. "It speaks a lot about the George Costanza character. I can really identify with George. For me, playing video games is the noblest, most efficient use of human time."

Robin would know about noble uses of time. He's done writing for television and is now enrolled at Brown Medical.

Alexander, best known for playing Costanza for nearly 10 years, was less impressed with Laffaye's feat, according to AOL News.

"Mazel Tov, you beat a fictional character with a fictional score," said Alexander. "Give your parents back whatever they paid for your college."

Gaming in Westport

Laffaye spent 16 years working at IBM in information technology, but left in 2005. Now, he manages some rental properties and spends a lot of time with his twin 9-year-old sons. He also spends a lot of time playing Frogger, but that isn't anything new.

He started his hobby when the game first came out and had spent many hours in Arnie's Place, the lavish arcade on the Post Road that now houses Anthropologie.

"Back in the day, [Frogger] was one of the top gaming titles in terms of quarters getting pumped into the machines, and still [it] is popular to this day," Laffaye said. "No matter which arcade you went to you could count on certain games being there and this was one of them."

With copper ceilings, red plush carpeting and luxurious wooden panels partitioning each game, Arnie's Place looked more like a casino than an arcade.

"I'd go there every once in a while," he said. "It wasn't like I was there every night. I played a whole bunch of different games, so it wasn't like it was just Frogger."

Laffaye took a hiatus of sorts from his Arnie's Place days, and only recently did his competitive gaming fire up once again. This was partially due to a friendly rivalry with Donald Hayes, a New Hampshire gamer whom Laffaye had been exchanging world records with over the last couple years.

"I am "¦ extremely competitive in these types of gaming situations and do not like to lose," Laffaye said. "As a youth, I played Westport Soccer Association travel soccer which taught me a lot about winning and losing -- and what it takes to become a champion."

Laffaye regularly goes to tournament events, and an attempt in November by Laffaye and Hayes to top the Costanza score at Fun Spot, an arcade in New Hampshire self-proclaimed to be the world's largest, ended up with no new records.

Since then, Laffaye had been playing in the storage room with the high score within sight. Whenever he plays, he needs to record everything on a video camera so the score can be verified by Twin Galaxies, an organization devoted to video game high scores. The testing is rigorous to ensure authenticity due to the number of cheaters who claim to have high scores. On the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, his high score was confirmed and announced. It was official.

With the score toppled and his goal achieved, Laffaye isn't sure what's next. He plays some modern games, but prefers the classics from his youth. He'd like to top a million in Frogger, but he also wouldn't mind topping a score of another vintage game.

"Maybe Hang On [a motorcycle racing game] is kind of within reach," Laffaye said. "The nice thing about Hang On is that it's only six minutes long, so I'd rather play a game for six minutes and get a world record than play one for six hours."