Gaming Records Week: Game Script

To finish off my week of Gaming Records, I figured I would talk about something that played into both of my major interests in life: Video games and writing.  As someone who aspires to possibly write video game scripts for a living, this one really blows me away just thinking about the collective effort necessary to receive such an accolade.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Until Dawn as having the Longest script for a graphic adventure game.  The game, a PS4 smash hit from Supermassive Games, has a final script that was reported by Sony to be 1,000 pages long.  Screenwriters Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden claim that the original script was as long as 10,000 pages long.  That’s just ridiculous.

Cover Art provided by Wikipedia

While not too huge a fan of horror games in general, I have spent a good amount of time watching various YouTubers play Until Dawn (honestly just look the game up on YouTube, everyone and their Grandma has played it), and I’ve even gotten the chance to play a little bit of it for myself at one of my good friend Tiana’s birthday parties.  The depth that comes into the story when given such a wide variety of options to explore in a relatively confined but fleshed out space is honestly incredible.

Though I wish to write my own scripts one day, I will say that the idea of trying to beat a record like this is certainly a daunting task in itself.

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That’s it for my Gaming Records Week, I hope you all enjoyed it and maybe even learned something!

If there are any gaming records that you know off-hand or find fascinating, feel free to talk about them in the comments.  It’s an awesome subject to tackle, and I’d love to hear other peoples input on cool gaming records!

Gaming Records Week: Swearing

Sometimes video games include swearing.

If you’re considering Scarface: The World is Yours however, than video games include a lot of swearing.

Boxart courtesy of Wikipedia

Scarface: The World is Yours was a multi-platform game released on October 10, 2006 by Radical Entertainment under the published by Sierra Entertainment and distributed by Vivendi Games.  It’s a Grand Theft Auto inspired third-person action game based on the 1983 Brian De Palma movie Scarface. According to IGN, “The Scarface video game creates a gameplay environment that authentically recreates the historical time period of the film, touching on politics, news items and events of the day.”

Why did this game receive a Guinness World Record for its swearing?  Well… During the course of the game’s 15-hour story there are about 31,000 lines of dialogue.  Apparently,  the f-word alone is used 5,688 times in just this timespan alone.

I tend to swear pretty often in casual conversation with my friends, but if I was that bad about it I know my parents would be ready to wash my mouth out with soap, that’s for sure.

Gaming Records Week: Arcade Machine

Following off yesterday’s record on a large game console controller, today’s Guinness World Record is for the world’s Largest Arcade Machine.

Image courtesy of the Guinness Book of World Records

44-year-old Jason Camberis, who builds and sells arcade machines and security systems for a living, was interviewed in 2015 about his massively scaled arcade cabinet, which appears in the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records.  The machine is actually functioning and plays over 200 classic arcade games, including PacMan and Dragon Spirit.

The machine itself “stands taller than a fully grown African elephant” at 4.41 meters tall and 1.06 meters deep.  According to Chamberis in his interview with the Guinness Book of World Records, “It brings you back in time to when you were young and you were a lot shorter and you felt that whole experience of being in front of a video game, where you’re looking up and grabbing the handles and playing the game – being in the game.”

While I personally grew up in an era where video game arcades were mostly phased out of popular culture besides in novelty, thanks to the advent of home console gaming, I have spent a good amount of time playing classic arcade games in various ports and in arcades in places like Round Table Pizza.  Even if I hadn’t had the chance to play these games however, just the idea of an arcade machine that large is still astounding both in sheer scale and in ideological dedication to the foregone gaming world.

Gaming Records Week: NES Controller

In 2012, the Guinness World Record was set for the world’s Largest Video Game Controller.    The NES Controller, 30 times larger than its original counterpart, was shown off at the launch for the Guinness Book of World Record’s 2012 Gamer’s Edition in London, England.

Image Courtesy of the Guinness Book of World Records

Created in five months by Ben Allen, a British Engineering student, the controller measured 366 cm x 159 cm x 51 cm and weighed about 265 pounds.  Two people were required to push each button enough to get it to work, and it could communicate with a standard controller – allowing it to actually play whatever game it was linked to.

Gaming Records Week: Minesweeper

Here’s a fun record to kick things off.  Did you know that the largest game of Minesweeper was created by the company CineMassive in August, 2015?  2015 was Minesweeper’s 30th anniversary, and to celebrate this the video wall company teamed up with Minesweeper developers to create a massive version of the game.

Image Courtesy of nerdist.com

The dimensions of the game’s playing area were 246.84 inches wide by 92.96 inches high, or about 20.57 feet by 7.75 feet, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.  The game was so big that it required 30 HD TV’s linked together to show the entire thing.  Overall, 38,799 mines were hidden in the playing field when the “Super Challenge” was set to expert mode.

Now, personally, I’ve always been really terrible at Minesweeper.  I even sunk a lot of time into the Pokémon Heartgold and Soulsilver pseudo-version of Minesweeper, Voltorb Flip, and could barely get anywhere fast.  However, it’s awesome just to imagine the sheer size of a game that big.  I’d love to have the chance to try it, even if I’d probably lose in about three seconds or so.

A week of Gaming Records

My Mom is a book editor.  She does some freelancing work, some fact-checking, and runs a blog about her work and her interest in the English language over at Dara Rochlin Book Doctor.  Her interest does serve as a good dose of inspiration to me, as a lot of my passion in life revolves around the written word as well.  While working on a post for her blog, she looked up a number of word-related accolades from the Guinness Book of World Records.  That gave me the idea to look up a series of records on video games, since they’re obviously a large part of my life as well.

So, consider this something of an experiment I suppose.  Over the next five days, I’m going to have a short post go up each day talking about a different record out of the Guinness Book.  I’ll either choose them for how impressive they are, or I’ll choose them because they might have some personal story attached to them.  It’ll depend I’m sure, but either way the records will hopefully be interesting for everyone seeing me talk about them as much as they’ll be interesting to me.  Seems like something fun for me to do really, so I figure why not?

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now, so I hope all you viewers out there enjoy my Gaming Records Week.