Guinness now prints video gaming record

By Matthew Price

Published: April 11, 2008

Think your video game scores are the best? Find out just how far you need to go in the "Guinness World Records — Gamer's Edition 2008.”

The book includes profiles of top gamers and game producers, information on top-selling games, and lots of other trivia and tidbits.

Top scores on dozens of arcade, console and handheld games are provided by Twin Galaxies, the official record-keeping organization for video game scores, as seen in the film "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.”

However, the published list doesn't include everything Twin Galaxies keeps score of online — making the "Gamer's Edition” more of a trivia book than a comprehensive book of world records.

This could be to its credit — hundreds of pages of games many people haven't played followed by names most people don't know might not make for the most exciting tome. For the most part, "Gamer's Edition” instead goes for bite-size bits of information in a variety of presentations.

The layout resembles that of a magazine, and some of the non-score-based records are kind of pointless, like "Longest ‘Castlevania' title” and "First ‘Tiger Woods' game.”

Apple fans will be frustrated to see that almost no Mac-based games make the book, but there's still a lot of interesting information included.

Despite the success of "Halo 3” and "Grand Theft Auto III” and other mature-rated games, when it comes to sales, according to Guinness, Mario is still the champ.

"Super Mario Bros.” sold 40.2 million copies, including copies of the game that came bundled with Nintendo systems. Exclude games that came in bundles, though, and Mario still comes out on top: "Super Mario Bros. 3” from 1988 sold more than 17.2 million copies. According to "Guinness,” "Halo 3” had sold 5.7 million copies at press time, making it the best-selling Xbox 360 game.

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