According to the recently released Guinness Book of World Records 2015: Gamer’s Edition, an impressive 12 world records have been shattered by the brick-building, open-world game Minecraft.
A press release sent out by members of the Minecraft team detail the impressive list of broken records, which include the “most popular game beta” and the “best-selling indie game.” The rest of the records, including the goofy “most Minecraft snow golems built in one minute” achievement, can be seen below.
Longest marathon on Minecraft: Austrian gamer Martin Fornleitner played strategy and open-world game Minecraft for a blockbusting 24 hr 10 min in Vienna, Austria on August 19-20, 2011. Martin played the game on a Sony Xperia Play handset, and his achievement also set the record for the Longest marathon on a strategy game.
Best-selling indie game: Although its console versions are published by the big studios, the original Minecraft, published by Mojang, is a true indie hit. As of August 7, 2014, the official site for the game listed total PC and Mac sales at 16,176,201, a number slightly greater than the entire population of Ecuador. Mojang remains an independent outfit with just 40 employees.
Largest indie game convention: Some 7,500 people attended MineCon 2013 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL on November 2-3, 2013. MineCon has been an annual fixture for die-hard Minecraft aficionados since its inception in 2010. The first event, more of an informal get-together, attracted around 50 fans.
First country modeled at full scale in a video game: In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency launched a 1:1-scale recreation of Denmark in Minecraft, featuring every building and feature of the 16,602 square mile country for players to explore. The project was designed to promote the agency as well as to teach urban planning and geography in schools. The number of blocks used is around 4 billion.
Largest real-world place created in Minecraft: Using its geographical data for the UK, the Ordnance Survey created a map of Britain and its islands in Minecraft. It uses 22 billion blocks to represent 86,500 square miles of mainland Great Britain’s 88,745 square miles. Each block represents a ground area of 538 square feet.
Most concurrent players in one Minecraft world: Minecraft isn’t designed to support hundreds of players in a world at once, so when the YouTube channel Yogscast (which specializes in Minecraft) squeezed together 2,622 players on August 1, 2011, it was hardly playable. But they were all together nonetheless.
Most popular game beta: More than 10 million gamers signed up to play Minecraft during its beta period, which ran between December 20, 2010 and November 18, 2011, the day of the game’s official release on PC/Mac.
Most Minecraft snow golems built in one minute: Snow golems comprise two snow blocks stacked on top of one another with a single pumpkin or jack-o-lantern for a head. Using a specially created channel, gamer Nachtigall Vaz (Brazil) was able to create an army of 70 snow golems in 60 seconds on January 7, 2013.
Most viewed fan film based on a video game: The overall most popular fan film based on a video game of any genre is called “’Revenge’ – A Minecraft Parody of Usher’s DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love – Crafted Using Noteblocks”. Based on Minecraft, the video was uploaded to YouTube by user “CaptainSparklez” in August 2011 and had been viewed 139,888,399 times as of August 7, 2014.
Most downloaded Minecraft project: The user-created project The Dropper, by “Bigre” (Belgium), had been downloaded 1,145,546 times as of August 7, 2014. In The Dropper, players must fall through a series of structures and shapes, aiming to reach the bottom without hitting an obstruction first.
Most-played Xbox Live game: As of May 2014, players of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition had spent a total of 1.75 billion hours – or 199,772 years – playing the game, making it the most played title in the history of Xbox Live Arcade. According to Microsoft, Minecraft had sold 12.4 million copies as of April 2014, making it the best-selling XBLA game.
Longest journey in Minecraft: In March 2011, Kurt J. Mac (USA) began an epic journey to the edge of Minecraft’s vast world – the fabled “Far Lands” – in “Survival” mode, recording his ravels on his YouTube channel “Far Lands or Bust!” He uses his annual checks of how far he’s walked to raise money for charity. On March 6, 2014, three years into the trek, he discovered he’d walked 1,479,940 blocks (919,592 miles) from his original spawn. The “Far Lands” are about 7,800 miles from the original spawn point.
What do you think of this long and impressive list? Did you help Minecraft break any of these records?
