Do You Care About the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition?

Video game records. Do you care? Are they interesting? I genuinely want to know.

The Gamers’ Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records launched in 2008 and is now on its fifth edition. Have you bought one? I did. I picked up the 2008 edition for a fiver, flipped through it twice and haven’t thought about it since.

See, the thing about the normal Guinness Book of World Records for me was that it’s filled with all sorts of freaky and incredible things, from the world’s tallest man to the world’s largest bagel. It was a slice of weird and wonderful and batshit insane. Feats of skill that I could actually admire people for doing, like the World’s Fastest Guitar Playing (620 bpm). Why anyone would want to do that I don’t know but it’s impressive all the same. The point is that you can pick up the book, flip the pages and a world of diverse talents and horrifying achievements is opened up. There’s a guy who’s collected over 1900 film projectors. Madness!

And then we have the Gamer’s Edition where we have First Woman to win a Pro-Street Fighter Event (congrats on being good AND having a vagina), Fastest Lap on Mario Kart, Most Prolific Dancing Game High Scorer and Most Consecutive Wins on Street Fighter. Now I’m certainly not saying that these feats of skill are any less worthy than fastest guitar playing or spinning half a kilo of pizza dough. I just have trouble giving a shit.

That being said, my friends who run StickTwiddlers ran a fundraiser last year in which they broke four World Records and raised over £500 for GamesAid, so it’s not like these things are entirely frivolous.

Do you honestly care enough about who spent the Longest Time Playing an FPS Game to buy a copy of the book?

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