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New York Times Features Vogel's on Guinness World
Record "Breaking a World Record for Gaming," July
20, 2010
by Nick Bilton,
New York Times
July 20, 2010, 1:36 pm
Breaking a World Record for Gaming
By NICK BILTON
People are constantly breaking world records. This month alone, a record
was broken for the longest tennis match, a mind-blowing 11 hours and 5
minutes. The record was also recently broken for the world’s largest
salad, weighing in at 29,579 pounds. (No word on the salad dressing.)
But another, nerdier record, was shattered this week when six Dutch
video game players went on a 50-hour, or 3,000 minutes, gaming marathon
to break the Guinness World Record for longest period of time playing a
video game.
The previous record was set last year by Chirantan Patnaik, an Indian
gamer who played for 40 hours and 20 minutes.
The new world champions, who are probably sleeping right now, played the
game
Red Dead Redemption, a first-person cowboy game set in the early
1900s, for more than two days. The gamers played on
Sony PlayStation 3
and used a special power docking station,
TwistDock, to keep
their video game controllers charged during their record-breaking
exertions.
During the game, the players were allowed to take a 10-minute break
every hour for humanitarian purposes — to use the restroom and eat.
The players were originally competing with each other to break the
previous world record, but decided to band together to pass the
milestone together. As a result, the six players shared a cash prize and
the publication of their names in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The six winning gamers are Sven de Vries, Renzo Bos, Robbie van Eijkeren,
Marcel van Waardenburg and Edward and Maykel Leest, who are brothers.
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