guinness-world-records posts

The Guinness World Records organization manages to list all sorts of records and events from around the globe and today the group announced that one game had the world's "most successful entertainment launch of all time." To no one's shock it's for the release of Modern Warfare 2 back in November 2009.

The first person shooter from developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision brought in $401.6 million worldwide for its first day of release, which has been verifed by the Guinness organization. We assume that total includes any sales of the PC version of the game. The game broke the previous record of $310 million which was set by the console release of Grand Theft Auto IV back in 2008.

This past Sunday (Valentine's Day), Star Trek fans gathered together on the Millennium Bridge in London, England to both celebrate the launch of Star Trek Online and to set the world record for 'largest gathering of Star Trek fans dressed in character'. 99 participants all dressed as their favorite characters, officiated by Guinness World Records with assistance from fans like Giles Aston who is also a professional 'Captain Jean-Luc Picard' impersonator (as seen in the video) to verify costume quality. The event was truly - as Spock would say - fascinating. However, this was the first time Guinness World Records editors were called to record such an event, so there's no way of knowing how it compares to various Star Trek conventions.

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We feel that world records should be given to things like the fastest human or the largest stadium or maybe the guy who got hit by lightening seven times. It shouldn't be given to, say, "Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever". Yet that is just what Eidos says was done for Batman: Arkham Asylum by the Guinness World Records organization.

The super hero action game was just released to consoles this week (it's due on the PC on September 15) so for the game to get such a "record" now seems odd. What if a few web sites or media outlets decide they hate the game after today for legitimate reasons? Will Guinness come back to Eidos and go, "Hey, that world record you guys got? We need it back . . . Thanks."? And who was the previous record holder? No one seems to know.

On the last day of E3 2009, the Guinness World Records organization announced that a number of PC game developers and publishers were honored with brand new records for game sales. Above you can see Blizzard execs Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams accepting two awards; one for World of Warcraft becoming the most popular MMO with 11.6 million subscribers and the other for the original Starcraft becoming the world's most successul PC strategy game with 9.6 million copies sold.

Also honored during E3 was Bethesda Softworks for the fastest-selling multi-platform RPG. That would be for Fallout 3 which sold a total of 4.7 million copies in its first week on sale. Finally the US music group The Dares were honored as the first such group to hold a concert in both the real world and in the virtual world at the same time for a performace at E3 while also "performing" inside Sony Online's free-to-play MMO Free Realms.