Guinness Book of Records Gamers Edition Review

By Tristan Clark

Good if you need to brush up on your gaming knowledge.

You know gaming must be a pretty big thing when you get your own specially tailored Guinness Book of Records. While there have been various gaming records in the main book, this new shiny set of pages presents a veritable deluge of intriguing (and inane) facts and figures about the hobby we like to sink so much time into. So is it any good? Well, that depends on the kind of gamer you are.

The book is divided up into several distinct sections. This being the first volume of its kind, the initial pages give you a concise run down of video game history, from Atari to Microsoft. It would have been nice if the book didn’t weigh so heavily in favour of the last couple of generations, but I suppose younger people won’t care so much about the console wars of the early nineties (if they were even alive then).

Specifications and summaries are also provided for everything from the original PlayStation to the current line of consoles. But the real meat of the book is the collection of records held by specific games, broken down into genre. From Mario to Zelda, from Sonic to Mega Man, all the most famous (and infamous) games are in here.

The records themselves are a bit hit and miss in my opinion. While most are at least fairly interesting, especially if you’re into the games (I quite enjoyed the Sonic records), some of them just appear to have been created out of thin air for no real reason. I mean seriously, even on the Sonic page, why on earth would they name the hedgehog as the fasted character in the video game world because Sega once said he can break the sound barrier? It’s not even true, based on the recent atrocity that was Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games…

Other sections break the book up, and short interviews with a pleasingly diverse number of industry luminaries are a welcome addition. Overall, this book is for the kind of gamer who is hardcore enough to appreciate the fastest completion time for the original Sonic the Hedgehog (around 17 minutes), yet casual enough not to have known this information already. Particularly hardcore gamers will likely know most of the information they care about in this book already – and may get annoyed at some of the rather trivial ‘facts’ that get slipped in amongst actual records.

But for a lot of gamers, especially those who want a handy tome to help them brush up on the industry’s greatest games, this is an entertaining, well-presented read.

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