The Most Interesting and Bizarre Gaming Records from the Guinness Book

Records have been present in video games since the first games ever were released. Who has never wanted to have their initials on the arcade high score screen, or have the highest score, or trophies in a game? There are several ways to immortalize yourself with a record in video games, from marathons to speedruns. The "Guiness Book" list includes these feats, some very interesting and others very bizarre, such as 'The greatest human control' ever made.

In this article, I bring some gems that I found on the Guinness website, and of course, Brazil is mentioned on the list!

"Lil Poison" is the nickname of Victor De Leon III, a little American who started playing NBA 2K at the age of two. At four, Lil entered his first competition, a Halo tournament in his hometown of New York. A year later, he competed in the Major League Games.

And at just six years old, Lil signed an exclusive contract with the organizers of Major League Gaming, becoming the youngest professional player in history to be signed.

In the 2010s, when the internet was exploding around the world and reaching millions of homes, Blizzard's game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty went down in history as the most illegally downloaded game.

According to the Book of Records, Wings of Liberty was made available by websites via "torrents", totaling 2.3 million downloads in the three months following its release.

Only more than ten years after its release, this record was legally broken. Dying Light 2, and It Takes Two managed to achieve higher sales upon their release, surpassing the numbers of illegal downloads.

This is probably nothing to be proud of for Microsoft, but the owner of the Xbox brand holds the most extensive warranty offered for a video game console.

In 2006, the company had to extend the Xbox 360 warranty to restore market confidence, after several models of the console presented the dreaded and fatal "Red Ring of Death" error.

The appearance of red lights on the console's shutdown button signaled that the equipment had "died" due to overheating. The problem, caused by production flaws, plagued many Xbox owners and forced Microsoft to extend the 360's warranty to three years, twice the warranty period offered for any other console.

Stop and think a little bit about any game you’ve played and thought the name was too long.... Did you? I'm sorry to tell you that it certainly doesn't come close to what we'll see next, as no name that comes to mind will be bigger than the game on this list.

The longest title ever recorded in the Book of Records is 'Natsuiro Haisukūru: Seishun Hakusho - Tenkō shonichi no ore ga osananajimi to saikai shitara hōdō buin ni sa rete ite gekisha shōnen no hibi sukūpu dai renpatsu de igai to motemotenanoni nazeka maimemorī ga pantsu shashin bakkari I'm iu-den mi to mukiainagara kangaeru hito natsu no shima no gakuen seikatsu to sekirarana koi no yukue', the title of a commercially released game. With 336 characters, including spaces and punctuation marks (277 characters without).

The adventure is an open-world RPG developed exclusively in Japan. The translation of the game's title is quite literal, meaning something like: "A summer at school on an island where I remember the first day after I moved, when I met a childhood friend and was forced to join the journalism club. My days as paparazzi with big scoops made me quite popular with the girls. However, interestingly, my camera is full of intimate photos and where is my romance going?".

And if you think that the country best known for online-related antics would be left out of the Guinness Book, you are wrong, Brazil has a record there. Although it’s something very strange and bizarre, we are in the 2010 edition of the book and have the title of "the most extensive police siege involving a video game accessory".

In February 2009, a man in the Federal District (Brasilia) held a 10-hour negotiation with local police. He held a 60-year-old woman hostage with a "SEGA Light Phaser", the Master System's light gun, used to play rail shooters such as 'Gangster Town', 'Hang On' and 'Missile Defense 3D'.

Fortunately, the incident ended without the woman being injured, and the incident made Guinness and internet history.

Imagine having a controller that weighs half a ton? The largest video game controller recorded by Guinness is 4,002 meters long, 2,168 meters wide and 0.724 meters thick.

This record was achieved by the OPPO Gamepad C1 in Shenzhen, Guangdong in China, on November 30, 2019. The Gamepad C1 was produced in fifteen days and weighs approximately 500 kg.

Later, a normal version of the control was manufactured to be used on smartphones!

Sonic has appeared on several platforms over the years, since the Sega Genesis in 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog and still has titles releasing nowadays. However, he is the first video game character to be the protagonist of a game made in a popcorn machine!

Sega released the Segasonic Popcorn Shop on April 13, 1993, a vending machine equipped with an interactive video game that allows you to "make" popcorn, foiling Eggman's plans. It also offered three flavor options: Salt, Butter and Curry.

Sonic Mania also references the existence of this, with a SegaSonic Popcorn Shop present in Studiopolis Zone Act 1.

A Super Mario World popcorn machine was released the same year - although its release date is difficult to confirm, it does not have a video game element and instead uses a roulette game with LEDs.

Tetris and the Game Boy became the first video game and first console to be in space when Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov packed his bags for his 1993 mission aboard the Mir space station.

The cartridge left Earth on the Soyuz TM-17 rocket on July 1, 1993 and returned 196 days and 17 hours later, having orbited Earth more than 3,000 times. Invented in the Soviet Union, Tetris was considered a suitable game for the cosmonaut. Serebrov's game was later auctioned at Bonham's 2011 Space History sale for the sum of US$1,220.

People think of things to promote their products that defy logic. Someone from Sony had an extremely peculiar idea in this regard, bringing together 259 people on November 1, 2013. The company Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong Limited in China put everyone together to pose for a photo in the shape of a gigantic PlayStation controller, which entered the Guinness as the largest human control in history, measuring a circumference of 39.2 meters.

Ibrahim Al-Nasser, a video game collector from Saudi Arabia, set a new world record by connecting 444 consoles to a single television. The record was set on March 30, 2024 in the city of Riyadh.

The collection ranges from the first ever video game, Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, to the PlayStation 5 Slim, which was released in 2023.

Al-Nasser used several adapters and HDMI switches to connect the consoles. He created a detailed Excel spreadsheet to manage cables and adapters, and assigned each console a specific HDMI switcher.

Al-Nasser's room has a final configuration that includes more than 12 HDMI switches and 30 RCA switches.

He states that most of the cables are hidden, and that the table functions as a type of collection for the consoles. Al-Nasser reports that the idea of ​​joining Guinness came about when he realized that he had several consoles that he was unable to use due to television port restrictions.

Whether it's an interesting or bizarre record, the important thing is to be immortalized somewhere in the history of video games. Which record did you find most interesting and which the most bizarre?