Lucas Punkari
By most accounts, anyone who decides to play video games for 24 hours straight might be considered to be a bit crazy.
And while Fort Frances native Jason Gervais knows that will be the reaction that he’ll get from most people from what he’ll be doing this Saturday, the 26-year-old will be going after setting a world record.
Gervais will be looking to set a new Guinness World Record for the highest Xbox 360 gamerscore acquired within a 24-hour span, which was set in May of last year by New York-based video game journalist John Teti with a score of 10,290.
“While I was working at Walmart (where he is the seasonal and pets department manager) during the winter, I stumbled upon the gamer’s edition of the Guinness World Records and happened upon that record,” Gervais explained.
“I was surprised when I first saw it because through gaming on a regular basis I figured it would be a lot easier to get a higher score than that.
“At first I was joking about going for the record, but as the summer came along I started to get more serious into trying to break it, so I applied to the Guinness site and it just snowballed from there,” Gervais added.
Gervais is feeling pretty confident about his chances going into his attempt on Saturday, which will begin at 10 a.m., as during a 12-hour practice run on Sunday he amassed a score of 9,735 points, which can be achieved by completing certain goals during a game.
“Some of the older people that I work with were thought it was kind of redundant to be practicing playing video games,” Gervais joked.
“But by doing that run on Sunday, that made me almost double my confidence and feel really good about myself going into the attempt,” Gervais said.
One of the major hurdles Gervais found himself facing in the requirements set forth by Guinness was to have witnesses to his attempt that he doesn’t normally associate with, but that issue cleared itself in the last couple of weeks before his attempt.
“It was hard at first because I had to find someone that wasn’t family or a friend, and who would come by to watch somebody play video games,” Gervais explained.
“Luckily though my brother (Dallas) is a pretty big gamer as well, so he told a few of his friends about it and they were actually pretty excited about coming over to watch during the course of the attempt, so that was really cool.
“Plus if I run into any issues with the system, I have people telling me that ‘If you have any problems just give me a call and I’ll bring my system over,’ which has also been really nice,” Gervais added.
