The 50 greatest gaming world records

It takes dedication to be a fighting game record-breaker. All those characters and moves to memorise... our brains aren’t big enough!

27) Ninja speed
Ninja Gaiden Black, released on the Xbox 360 in 2005, is of course one of the hardest games known to mankind. In fact, it is officially harder than stones. So our hats are off to Mr. Josh Mangini, who holds the world record for completing it in the fastest time – an astonishing one hour, 55 mins and five seconds.

28) Highest score
The highest-rated fighting game ever is Namco’s Soul Calibur, released on the Sega Dreamcast in 1998. It has an average review ranking on Metacritic of 98%.

29) First film
Videogames notoriously don’t translate well to the medium of film. Think of Street Fighter or Dead or Alive (we’d rather forget Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne, thanks). Not great, were they? The very first fighting game turned into a film was Double Dragon, which came out in 1994.

30) Sauron sells out
Hack-and-slash fighting games have their own entry in the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition, including such games as Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. But, oddly enough, the best-selling game to fall under this banner is none other than EA’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which has sold 4.28 million copies worldwide since release in 2002.

31) Lorra Laras

Taking the record for the Most Official Real-Life Stand-Ins for a Videogame Character is Lara Croft. Her polygons have been portrayed by 10 different models since 1996, including actress Rhona Mitra and TV presenter Nell McAndrew. The current Lara is UK gymnast and model Alison Carroll.

32) Best fighter
OK, here’s something that may come as a surprise to fighting fans. (Or maybe not.) Who do you think is the strongest character in Capcom’s Street Fighter IV – the one who’s won the most online matches? It’s not Ken or Ryu, or even Dhalsim, but rather Sagat. He’s got a win-loss ratio of 49:31, having won a whopping 61% of matches.

33) Smashing stuff
The best-selling fighting game of all time is Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Released in May 2008, it has since sold an impressive 8.43 million copies. During its first week on sale, it sold at the rate of two units per second. Wow.

34) Poison Dwarf!

The world’s Youngest Professional Gamer is Victor De Leon III, or Lil Poison to his friends. He started gaming at age two, is now the grand old age of 11 and has held the record since 2005.

Puzzlers

Who doesn’t love a good puzzle game? No one. But you need a brilliant brain and fast fingers if you want to break any puzzling records...

35) Pronto portal
Valve’s mind-bending puzzle game Portal – included as part of The Orange Box in 2007, alongside Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2 and its first two accompanying episodes – took us rather longer to complete than we’d have liked. American Cody Miller, though, set a world record speed-run by whizzing through it in just 24 minutes and 37 seconds.

36) Popular puzzler
Ah! The eternal question; what is the most popular game of the century? It’s not Tetris, as that was launched in the last century. Nope, it’s PopCap’s little game that could, Bejeweled. Since May 2001, it’s been downloaded more than 350 million times and has sold more than 25 million units. Somebody, somewhere, has made a little bit of money.

37) Most objects
There can be only one record-holder when it comes to the category of ‘Most Unique Objects in a Puzzle Game’, and that record holder is, of course, the DS puzzle adventure Scribblenauts, released last year. Containing over 10,000 unique usable items, surely only the inevitable sequel can top this.

38) Tetris high score
The NES version of Tetris was released way back in 1988, but it took until last year for someone to reach the perfect score of 999,999 on the game. Harry Hong of Los Angeles, California made the record on April 19, 2009 after four years of practice.