Game Records That Will Never Be Broken
Beat the final boss. Defeat the opposing team. Get the highest score. Competition has been a fundamental part of video games ever since Pong brought digital games to the mainstream, and it's no surprise that many hardcore fans spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours trying to topple gaming's most prestigious achievements. Speedrunners, esport athletes, and the millions and millions of people who casually enjoy the latest and greatest online shooter are all united by the desire to be the very best — and what proves your supremacy better than your very own world record?
Don't bother with these records, though. They take more time and effort than you've got. They require skills that most people simply don't have. A few only exist because someone was at the right place at the right time, when unrepeatable circumstances made a record ripe for the plucking. It doesn't matter. No matter what, if you want to see your name in the record books, there are better ways to do it. For better or for worse, the following records are virtually unbeatable — and most likely, they always will be.
Rocketing to Fortnite fame
June 30, 2018 was a big day for Fortnite: Battle Royale. Not only was that the day that the Visitor launched a supervillain's rocket into the sky, introducing the time traveling rifts that've driven fans crazy ever since, but it was also when player Elemental_Ray achieved his greatest Fortnite achievement by setting the record for the most solo kills in a single game.
Now, Elemental_Ray is a decent player, but he's not a championship-caliber one. He tends to get killed about as often as he does the killing. He knows an opportunity when he sees one, though. See, unlike most of Fortnite: Battle Royale's story events, which tend to take place off-camera, the rocket launch happened live. When it did, many players stopped to watch. Some even built platforms to get a better view. That's when Elemental_Ray struck. While everyone else was busy gawking, Elemental_Ray took out the surface they were standing on. Nearly 50 people — plus Elemental_Ray himself — tumbled to their deaths, instantly turning Ray into the self-proclaimed "most hated man on Fortnite."
That's a lot of kills, and it's a record that should stand for a while (not counting records set by killing willing victims). Not only was June 2018's rocket launch special — in-game events like that are few and far between — but it's the kind of trick you can only play once. Don't expect future attempts at mass murder to go quite as smoothly.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare gets a few (million) thumbs down
Don't get the wrong idea: Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was the best-selling game of 2016. It's still Call of Duty, and moving millions of copies is just what Call of Duty does. When you've got a franchise as big as Call of Duty, though, that also means that you've got millions and millions of fans, and many of them aren't shy about sharing their opinions.
As such, Call of Duty players showed their displeasure by flooding the game's trailer with downvotes, making it the most-disliked gaming video in YouTube history. As of September 2018, Infinite Warfare has gotten the thumbs-down from YouTube viewers 3.7 million times. In fact, the Infinite Warfare trailer is the only gaming video among YouTube's most-hated.
So, why the downvotes? There are a few reasons. For one, while Advanced Warfare had already moved the franchise in a sci-fi direction, Infinite Warfare's spacefaring shenanigans strayed a little too far from the series' roots for fans to ignore. The sci-fi trappings also felt too familiar — at the time, Halo and Titanfall comparisons were harder to dodge than Infinite Warfare's bullets — and it came out at a time when fans were clamoring for a return to World War II (something they got a year later). These days, it seems unlikely that anything will generate enough hate to steal Infinite Warfare's dubious record. After Infinite Warfare, everything else looks like a big step up.
Playing Rocket League wrong never felt so right
If anyone is going to set a record using a non-standard video game controller, it's streamer Dylan "Rudeism" Beck. Beck's entire shtick is playing video games "wrong." Reaching level 100 in World of Warcraft using nothing but a dance pad? Yep, Beck's done it. Playing Overwatch's resident archer Hanzo using a Nerf bow, controlling the French hero Widowmaker with a baguette, or using a banana to rack up kills as the super-smart ape Winston? Check and check.
Beck is particularly familiar with Guitar Hero's plastic rock and roll peripheral, and when Guitar Hero came out, Beck says that he played "non-stop for about 5 years." He even placed in a few international tournaments. Similarly, the whole using-weird-controllers thing started when a friend challenged Beck to play Rocket League, Psyonix's addictive soccer-racing mash-up, with a Guitar Hero guitar. Since then, Beck has gone on to set the world record for goals scored in Rocket League using an instrument controller. In a single game against Rocket League's artificially intelligent opponents, Beck managed to put the ball in the net not once, not twice, but a staggering 88 times.
It's the kind of thing that's both unfathomably weird and that also takes a ton of practice, and other people probably don't have the experience or dedication to come for Beck's crown.
A Street Fighter streak for the history books
Anyone who's up on the Street Fighter competitive scene knows Ryan Hart. The dude's been around forever. He's been participating in Street Fighter tournaments since way, way back in 1994, and went fully pro in 2009. Hart holds a whole slew of Street Fighter records, too, including the most international competition wins, the most tournament wins total, and the longest Street Fighter IV win streak.
In 2016, he added another, and this one is going to be hard to top. On February 16, 2016, Hart faced off against 260 other world warriors, scoring the record for the most consecutive opponents fought in Street Fighter V. That's not as easy as it sounds. Unlike many other marathon-based records, which let competitors take breaks so that they literally don't kill themselves, Hart had to battle for 11 hours without stopping. That was tough. "There were times in the challenge where I just wanted it to be over," Hart admits, "but I tried to stay calm and think in small steps."
Superhuman endurance wasn't Hart's only qualification, either. Not only did Hart have to face opponents, he had to beat them. As per the rules laid down by Guinness World Records, Hart had to best at least 90% of his opponents in order to secure the record. That ended up not being a problem: when it came time for Hart's foes to test their mettle, the long-time street fighter defeated every single one of them.
Video gaming's unsung celebrity
Video game actors don't get the same respect as their television and movie counterparts — that strike happened for a reason — but over the past decade or so, a few people have emerged from the bowels of the recording booth to become legitimate celebrities. For a while, it felt like you couldn't get away from Nolan North, who plays Uncharted's Nathan Drake among many other roles. More recently, The Last of Us star Troy Baker seems to be everywhere. Actress Jennifer Hale didn't just blow everyone away as the female Commander Shepard in BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy: according to Guinness World Records, she's also the busiest female voice actor in the entire game industry
None of them, however, can hold a candle to Steve Blum, who officially became the most prolific voice actor in video game history back in 2012. Since then, his list of credits has only gotten longer. When Guinness first gave Blum the record, he'd appeared in a mere 261 video games, starting with the classic 1995 LucasArts adventure game Full Throttle. By February 2017, Blum had added over 100 more virtual roles to his resume, bringing the total to 366. As of this writing, that number is still going up.
That doesn't count any of Blum's non-gaming work, either. If you want to beat Blum's record, you better get started now. The dude has a nearly 25-year head start, and from all indications, he's not slowing down any time soon.
A Mario Maker hell of his own making
Captain Ahab has Moby Dick. Batman has the Joker. And Braden "Chain Chomp Braden" Moor has "Trials of Death," a Super Mario Maker level that he simply cannot beat. Oh, he's tried. He's tried a ton. In fact, Braden has an entire Twitch channel dedicated to his attempts to master "Trials of Death." As of this writing, he's spent just over a thousand days tackling "Trials of Death." He has yet to succeed.
Moor's constant failures do have a silver lining, though: as a result of his efforts, Guinness World Records gave Moor the record for the longest time trying to beat a Super Mario Maker level. Still, they're a little behind the curve. While Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2018 lists Moor's playtime at a measly 600 hours, he claims that he's put 2,200 hours into his quest.
Here's the clincher, though: he's also the one who created this monstrosity in the first place. He's also the only person who's ever played it. See, Super Mario Maker doesn't let you upload your creations until you've beaten them at least once. So far, that hasn't happened, but let's hope that Braden succeeds soon. After all, there's another record waiting for him: PangaeaPanga's "Pit of Panga: P-Break" is officially the most difficult Super Mario Maker level ever made, but we're betting that "Trials of Death" will give it a run for its money — if the public ever gets to try it, that is.
With this many theme parks, why are those birds still so angry?
Most video game characters don't even have their own rides, to say nothing of their own private theme parks. Heck, Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto landed his job at Nintendo thanks to his designs for amusement park attractions and partially based Mario on Mickey Mouse, and Nintendo isn't getting its own park until 2020, a solid 39 years after Nintendo's iconic plumber made his public debut.
You know who has not just one, not just two, but 11 different parks of their own, though? It's not Sonic the Hedgehog. Not Mega Man. Not Master Chief, Nathan Drake, or Pac-Man. Heck, it's not even a crossover hero like Batman. It's the Angry Birds. Yeah, the heroes of Rovio's ubiquitous physics puzzlers have parks dedicated solely to them in places like Russia, Spain, and Malaysia. Finland, where Rovio is based, has five of them, which contain everything from Angry Birds-themed playgrounds to rides to attractions that "upgrade" the mobile games.
At any rate, that's enough to earn Angry Birds the record for the video game franchise with the most theme parks, and given how expensive and time-consuming parks are to build, we're guessing that title is pretty safe. We're also not sure exactly why Angry Birds has so many of the darn things, although at least one is 100% unlicensed. Maybe Rovio didn't set out to conquer the theme park world. Maybe it just, y'know, happened.
The Minecraft map 83 billion blocks in the making
You can visit some pretty cool places via Minecraft. Can't make a trip to the Grand Canyon? Check it out in Minecraft instead. Ditto for Niagra Falls, the Great Pyramids of Giza, fantasy kingdoms like Game of Thrones' Westeros, and Great Britain. Yeah, Britain. All of it.
In 2014 the UK Ordnance Survey, a government-run company that's in charge of producing maps of Great Britain, released GB Minecraft 2. So what, you say? Well, according to Guinness World Records, which officially made Britain the largest real-life place created in Minecraft, GB Minecraft 2 brings a staggering 86,500 square miles' worth of land into Minecraft's voxel-filled world. It's full of detail, with recreations of Britain's various waterways, the entire national railroad system, local streets and roads, and even individual houses. In addition to everything else, GB Minecraft 2 is 83 billion blocks in size. So, yeah, that's not something you make in a single weekend.
It is something that you can make by yourself, however. GB Minecraft 2 was made by a single man, Joseph Braybook, who started the project while working as a UK Ordnance Survey summer intern before moving into a full-time role. He had some help, of course — the Ordnance Survey has all kinds of free resources and tools, and at least some of the map creation had to be automated — but still, go Joseph. No matter how you look at it, that's a massive accomplishment.
The biggest MMORPG in the world isn't what you think it is
Ask any random person what the biggest MMORPG on the planet is, and chances are they'll say World of Warcraft. That makes sense. As far as cultural awareness goes, Warcraft has been the king of the MMO space since the mid-'00s. But according to the player counts, it still isn't number one. While World of Warcraft scored its 100 millionth player back in 2014, Jagex's free-to-play RuneScape blows Blizzard's game out of the water. As of July 2017, when Guinness World Records gave RuneScape the nod for the most users of an MMO video game, RuneScape had 254,994,744 verified users. If RuneScape were a country, it'd be the fifth biggest in the world.
Good luck beating that, every other game ever made. It's not going to happen. Not only is constantly attracting new users via regular updates (RuneScape is also officially the most-updated MMORPG ever), but it's been around for the better part of two decades. In fact, it's older than pretty much every major MMO that's not called EverQuest or Ultima Online, both of which are still running but neither of which have changed or adapted quite as well as RuneScape has.
Sorry, Warcraft. You might have the bigger cultural footprint, but when it comes to size? RuneScape has you beat plain and simple.
When Twitch Plays Pokemon, we all make history
If you're reading an article like this, there's a good chance that you too are a world record holder — or, at the very least, you've been counted as part of one. It's been a few years since Twitch Plays Pokémon temporarily took over the internet, so here's a quick refresher. In 2014, an anonymous developer launched an ambitious social experiment on Twitch, the internet's premier game streaming site, that let viewers play the very first Pokémon game en masse by spamming the channel's chat feed with commands.
That sounds like chaos and it often was — just getting from place to place proved to be a major challenge — but somehow the community managed to beat the game. 390 hours and countless memes later, the hero Red finished Pokémon's main campaign and beat the Elite Four with a team consisting of Zapdos, Omastar, Pidgeot, Venomoth, Lapras, and Nidoking.
Twitch Plays Pokémon was, for a while, extremely popular. How popular, exactly? Guinness World Records says that 1,165,140 people contributed to Red's journey, making Twitch Plays Pokémon the record-holder for the most participants on a single-player online video game. That's kind of a funny title given that, outside of Twitch Plays Pokémon, "single-player online video games" aren't really a thing, but hey, a record is a record — and doesn't it feel great to know that you were part of something so momentous?
Yeah. That's what we thought.
When it comes to GoldenEye 007, nobody does it better
It seemed like Bryan Bosshardt could never be defeated. See, Bosshardt finished GoldenEye 007's first level, Dam, on Agent difficulty in a mere 53 seconds. That was back in 2002. For 15 years, his record stood, tied but never beaten — and then Karl Jobst came along. On December 2, 2017, Jobst fired up the classic Nintendo 64 shooter and knocked a full second off of Bosshardt's record-setting run. For the GoldenEye speedrunning community, it was a big, big deal.
Since then, Jobst has zeroed in and obliterated two more of GoldenEye 007's four oldest speedrunning records. There's only one left: Runway, on Agent difficulty, which currently sits at 22 seconds. This time around, however, Jobst might be out of luck. Bosshardt's original time might just be unbeatable. In a 17-minute dissection of Runway by RWhiteGoose, the video maker runs down the challenges that Jobst and other 007 speedrunners face when tackling the level. RWhiteGoose surmises that a speedrunner could theoretically finish Runway in 21 seconds if they can get eight "boosts" — i.e., getting pushed around the level by enemy projectiles, which is faster than running — from grenades, but that relies on finicky and unpredictable enemy AI.
Old technology is a problem, too. When Bosshardt set his original GoldenEye records, he recorded the runs on a VHS tape, which means that every time is rounded to the nearest second. As a result, future speedrunners need to beat his time by a full second. No fractions allowed. Realistically, RWhiteGoose says, a 21-second run is possible but statistically unlikely, and unless Jobst or his peers are incredibly lucky, Bosshardt's final record should be safe for the foreseeable future.