Selections from Guinness World Records 2012 Gamers Ed.

The folks at Guinness were kind enough to send me an early copy of their Gamer’s Edition of the Guinness World Records 2012 last week. It’s a really fun read, packed with 200 pages of gaming trivia and oddities, smartly sorted by gaming genres. Factoids, high score charts, and even a tagline quiz are included. Every couple of pages I found a WTF or an Oh, neat bit, and then I’d go looking for someone else to tell. This stuff is kind of lost on a non-gamer, so I saved a few notable selections for you:

Most game data illegally downloaded: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, weighing in at 15.77 Petabytes (that’s a 7.19 GB torrent at about 2.3 million downloads).

Most Endings in a Japanese RPG: Chrono Trigger, with 14 in all. Note that this record goes to the DS version as it has one moreꦓ ending than the SNES original.

Best-selling Avatar item on XBLA Marketplace: Night Vision Goggles from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Microsoft doesn’t say how many sets of these virtual goggles were sold, but I’m sure they’re happy with the money they made at $3 a pop.

First arcade game boss: 1980 shmup game Phoenix was the first game to have a harder-﷽than-normal character placed at the endཧ of a level.

Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition is available now in the US for an MSRP of $14.99 at your favorite bookselle🦂r. has it for f𝄹or only $9.96.