The folks at Guinness were kind enough to send me an early copy of their Gamer's Edition of the Guinness World Records 2012 last week. It's a really fun read, packed with 200 pages of gaming trivia and oddities, smartly sorted by gaming genres. Factoids, high score charts, and even a tagline quiz are included. Every couple of pages I found a WTF or an Oh, neat bit, and then I'd go looking for someone else to tell. This stuff is kind of lost on a non-gamer, so I saved a few notable selections for you:
Most game data illegally downloaded: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, weighing in at 15.77 Petabytes (that's a 7.19 GB torrent at about 2.3 million downloads).
Most Endings in a Japanese RPG: Chrono Trigger, with 14 in all. Note that this record goes to the DS version as it has one more ending than the SNES original.
Best-selling Avatar item on XBLA Marketplace: Night Vision Goggles from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Microsoft doesn't say how many sets of these virtual goggles were sold, but I'm sure they're happy with the money they made at $3 a pop.
First arcade game boss: 1980 shmup game Phoenix was the first game to have a harder-than-normal character placed at the end of a level.
Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition is available now in the US for an MSRP of $14.99 at your favorite bookseller. Amazon has it for for only $9.96.
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
3:00 PM on 01.03.2012 | 
Though they look like shit so... I don't wear them.
They should have sold it for $10 a pop!!
Probably dumb to ask, but thats never stopped me before: Does Microsoft make the bank from those, or does Activision? Because in my -probably- backwards sensibilities I'd imagine Activision makes more because its an object based on their game.
"First arcade game boss:"
This kinda isn't fair is it? I mean there's no way another game is ever going to beat that "first ever thing that was ever, ever!" idk.. Still cool, but I like the idea that these things can be beat and overcoming one another.. evolve.. more then they just exist as some weird trophy forever and ever.
How the hell can it even be considered a record if they don't disclose the number they sold? Hell if that is the case tho I should be in that book for holding the most records*
*number of records not disclosed.
FUCK YEAH!
we need a n edit button
Kotick: I see. How many bytes are we looking at? Megas? Gigas?
Asst: It's Petas, sir.
Kotick: The horror.
I look at Lara croft (old school) and Ivy (SCIV) and I can't decide.
Last I checked it had something like 80 different endings depending on your relationships with the different characters.
It has been an absurdly long time since I've beaten SO2, but aren't most of those minor variations and not true alternate endings? Trigger has 14 different endings.
Happy to see chrono trigger on there tho. Who didn't love the frog ending?
...then why isn't it even on the top 5? http://www.destructoid.com/most-pirated-games-of-2011-include-crysis-mario-gears-218757.phtml
One of my all time faves back in the day..... I remember kicking ass in that game, my friends and I would have competitions to see who get the farthest and the highest score.
*Looks back at the article*
SOON.
Something tells me it's going to be really difficult to break that record.
Now go back into your corner.