Comment by Arcorann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arcorann | Hacker News Reader

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Posted three days ago, funnily enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820685

I've never had much faith in 2000s-era Twin Galaxies scorekeeping, ever since I saw their recorded scores for Pokemon Pinball in the first Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition and realised that they were lower than my own (not especially good) scores.

In this particular case, it turns out that if you count unofficial records, Japanese player Koryan (who incidentally is still active) recorded over 5000 lines in 2001 [1]; compare the TG verified record of 4988 set by Harry Hong one month after this article in 2007 and the current TG record of 5164 set by Tao Kitamoto in 2016 [2]. It's likely that Harry Hong could have beaten his previous record at any time if someone had contested it earlier.

[1] http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tetris/sco.htm

[2] https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/154227

People have found out that if you get specific enough or if you choose something people don't really care about, you can get a Guinness World Record.

For example: there's a guy who had a record invalidated for "fastest time to build the Lego UCS Millenium Falcon (75192)" because he forgot a piece. That's not the point. The point is that he clocked a time of right around 16 hours. Which I found weird. Because that's about what I clocked as well. Now, I wasn't super rigorous. When I started, I started a timer, when I finished for the day, I stopped the timer. At the end, I added all the times together.

And I wasn't trying to build fast. I was just vaguely interested in how long it would take me to assemble a 7500 piece set.

There's a guy on Penn Jillette's podcast, Michael Goudeau. He's a clown. Like, professionally. He has the Guinness World Record for most bites taken out of an apple in a minute while juggling. Dude Perfect holds the Guinness World Record for most ping pong balls stuck on a person's head using shaving cream.

Remember, Guinness doesn't approach people, people approach Guinness. Then there's a whole process about getting the record verified. If it seems like a lot of work for a piece of paper and to be an answer to a trivia question, you'd be right.

I met someone years ago who was an adjudicator for Guinness. I remember two stories in particular. One was a trip to Venezuela to judge a biggest bowl of soup (chicken IIRC), the other to Italy for a biggest doner kebab! (yes Italy not Greece). She said her biggest concern was that the doner kebab would fall off an underspecced trolley and kill someone, though I imagine that would probably have achieved a record of its own!

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