Lucas Punkari
Confirmation
needed on
world record
After playing video games for 24 hours earlier this month, and setting an unofficial new world record in the process, Jason Gervais now has to undergo a waiting process before seeing his name in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The 26-year-old Fort Frances resident, by day the seasonal and pets department manager at Wal-Mart here, unofficially broke the current world record for the highest Xbox 360 score acquired within a 24-hour span, which was set in May of last year.
But even though his record attempt is long done, Gervais still has to take care of several things before sending off his items to the Guinness headquarters in London, England.
“I have to condense all of the video footage that I took of the entire attempt into a condensed highlight reel, and I have to get all of the witnesses statements notarized,” he explained.
“It has to go all the way to the U.K. so all things considered, I’m hoping to know for sure that everything is confirmed in about a month or so.
“And if it can get there in time for the record to be in next year’s gamer’s edition of the World Records, that would be awesome,” he enthused.
“I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t get it at this point, as I had three cameras documenting everything, and all the rules that I had to abide by I followed right to the letter.”
Gervais’ score of 13,290 was 3,000 more than the previous record, which was set by New York-based video game journalist John Teti.
His total mostly was achieved during the first 12 hours of the attempt, leaving the Fort Frances native with the second half to try to get more points in some of the more challenging games in his collection.
“Playing those tougher games in the second 12 hours was probably why I didn’t double the previous record and only beat it by a total of 3,000 points,” Gervais reasoned.
“Beating the score by that many points, though, isn’t a small margin by any means,” he stressed.
“But from the standpoint of getting 10,000 points at the halfway point, it does look that way.”
When reflecting on his attempt, Gervais found that getting the number of points needed to break the record, achieved when a gamer completes certain accomplishments in a game, was not as difficult as some of the other things he had to do beforehand.
“Playing the games was actually the easy part,” he admitted. “It was just the entire process of getting witnesses to come over and following all of the rules that was actually the hardest part.”
Another issue Gervais thought about beforehand was how he would be able to handle playing video games for an entire day. But as it turned out, that went better than he expected, as well.
“Staying awake proved to be a lot easier than I thought it would be,” he remarked.
“I had a boatload of energy drinks in my fridge ready in case I needed it, but I only ended up having one of those in the morning, so it turned out I really didn’t need all of those drinks.
“I realized that I was just gaming all night, and it just ended up being pretty easy.”
After completing the 24 hours of gaming required for the attempt, Gervais did the first thing anyone would do after staying up for that long: hitting the hay.
“I slept for about seven hours and got up early enough to be tired again before bed later on Sunday night,” he recalled.
“I woke up early on Monday morning for work and I thought that maybe I wouldn’t be feeling too good, but as it turned out I did just fine,” he added.
Although Gervais was attempting something most people wouldn’t even think about doing, he feels it definitely was worth the try.
“It was just a couple of extra hours of gaming on a Saturday,” he laughed.
