UPDATE: Check out our exclusive interview with Ray Cox about his quest for 1,000,000.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: When is comes to gaming these days, you’re either an achievement lover or you’re not.
I would even call myself that – maybe even a whore. I love to go out of my way in games to unlock special, secret, or supremely difficult achievements. Whether you call them achievements or trophies or whatever, I feel that they add another dimension to any game. Instead of just playing the game to enjoy the game and eventually beat it (which is satisfying enough), you can play the game to do other cool stuff as well. It’s really a win-win in my book.
And of course, if you’re and Xbox 360 player, unlocking achievements leads to a higher gamerscore. My gamerscore probably sits somewhere around 25,000 – but then again, I go through periods where my gaming activity is almost next to nothing.
I doubt that Ray Cox goes through any such periods.
Cox, or Stallion83 to the Xbox world, is the Guinness World Record holder for highest gamerscore. Earlier this week, he announced on his site that he had hit a major milestone: 700,000.
Let’s put that into perspective. There are exceptions, but your average Xbox 360 game comes stocked with achievements totaling 1,000 points. Some games add more opportunities for gamer points through DLC and such, but let’s just stick with 1,000 per game. The amount of time that it takes to complete a game (while playing for achievements) depends on the particular game that you’re playing – but some tougher games can take 20, 30, even 40 hours of gameplay time to grab most of the achievements.
In short, for someone who has played their fair share of Xbox, a 700,000 gamerscore is absolutely mind-boggling.
And he doesn’t want to stop there. He’s on a quest for 1,000,000. According to his site, 1milliongamerscore, his quest began in November, 2005. It took him 2,312 days to hit 700K.
Here’s the video he compiled to celebrate the milestone.
And if you’re wondering if that was a pain in the ass to make, well, it was:
The video was pain in the rear end to make. Ever since I hit 600,000 gamerscore back in August of 2011 I’ve basically recorded every shred of video game footage. Hundreds of hours all packed onto my HDD. Most of the achievements were buried in files that were 3 to 4 hours long. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And it took a ton of work to finally get done. I hope you all enjoy it.
The achievement that got him to 700K, as you probably saw, was “Insanity” from Mass Effect 3. Cox said that he hit 700K on that achievement purposefully, even avoiding other achievements in the game in order to time it up perfectly.
He hit 600,000 back in August of 2011, so by my math, he’s looking at breaking through 800,000 in October of this year and his prized 1,000,000 sometime around December of 2013.
[h/t VentureBeat]