Next-gen.biz has a nice write-up on Gaming's 50 Greatest Guiness World Records.
Some of the more interesting records include:
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Longest game title
The longest game title was for a Japanese-only PS2 game released in 2005. It’s called White Princess the Second – Yappari Itto ni Ittemo Soujyanakutemo Ok-na Gotsugou Shugi Gakuen Renai Adventure, or in English, White Princess the Second – Love Adventure in the School That Follows the Principle of Convenience, Where It’s Okay to Stray From the Path or Stay on the Path.
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Highest production budget
The game with the highest budget was Sega’s Shenmue, which cost $70,000,000 to create. It took seven years to complete and first appeared on the Sega Dreamcast in December 1999. However, it may soon be beaten by the Silicon Knights game Too Human for Xbox 360, which sources claim has already cost over $80,000,000.
I wonder how many copies of Shenmue and Too Human need to be sold in order to break-even?
The Metal Gear series is famous for its lengthy animated story sequences, or cutscenes. The longest single cutscene in the series lasts for 15 mins 17 secs and comes at the end of Metal Gear Solid, as Snake destroys Metal Gear Rex.
I'm sure a good bit of the 80,000,000 has to do with the Unreal engine problems they had, hence the lawsuit. From what I gather they had to pretty much make their own engine after licensing the Unreal engine, that plus the extended development time would add up. 80 mil seems pretty crazy though.
Different sources give conflicting reports on the cost of the game. Guinness World Records say that the cost was $20,000,000, as do other sites [4], yet GameSpot give it at $70,000,000 [2], as does Yu Suzuki [3]. It has been claimed that 70 million was the cost for the entire project (from Sega Saturn to Dreamcast) and that 20 million is the cost for the Dreamcast project alone.
It apparently went through a few iterations before it became the game that was eventually released, and as mentioned above, some of that $70m figure was for Shenmue II. And the game itself was a relatively big-budget title for the time (lots of very detailed 3D environments, lots of voice acting, music, sound effects).
Players of Starcraft and similar games have developed several different programs to track in-game statistics. Key to success in these games is the number of actions per minute a player can manage. A new player of Starcraft, after about a week’s play, can manage perhaps 20 actions-per-minute (APM). A pro-gamer will be looking to maintain around 180 APM, though they can reach peaks of over 1,000 APM during battles in-game. This is the equivalent of clicking a mouse or pushing a button up to 17 times every second.
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Largest console
Measuring 320 x 100 x 260mm, with a mass of 3.86 kg, the Xbox was heavier than the PlayStation 2, the Sega Dreamcast and the Nintendo GameCube. This was mainly due to the bulk of the internal hard drive and the large DVD-ROM drive. A section in the manual warned that a falling Xbox could cause injury! The Xbox was also the first console to provide an Ethernet port (for online play) as standard. Although the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 supported online play, they both required additional hardware to connect to a modem or router. The rest is online gaming history – Xbox Live now has over 10 million Gold subscribers.
The Xbox was also the first console to provide an Ethernet port (for online play) as standard. Although the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 supported online play, they both required additional hardware to connect to a modem or router. The rest is online gaming history – Xbox Live now has over 10 million Gold subscribers.
The Dreamcast came with dialup modem and phone cord standard... You needed additional hardware to hook up to ethernet, but for dialup, everything was included.
The Dreamcast came with dialup modem and phone cord standard... You needed additional hardware to hook up to ethernet, but for dialup, everything was included.
The NES had dialup albeit a very short-lived dialup.
I'm sure a good bit of the 80,000,000 has to do with the Unreal engine problems they had, hence the lawsuit. From what I gather they had to pretty much make their own engine after licensing the Unreal engine, that plus the extended development time would add up. 80 mil seems pretty crazy though.
Its been in the works since the late-PS1 era I heard. That might be more of a reason than just UE3.
Its been in the works since the late-PS1 era I heard. That might be more of a reason than just UE3.
I am sure that does factor in, but development on those platforms (PS1, GC) wasn't as expensive as it is now on PS3 and 360. Also it seems they had not done much work on it back then:
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Crispy Gamer: How far into development on PlayStation was the game when you decided to move it over to GameCube? How far were you into development on GameCube when you moved it over to the Xbox 360?
Dyack: It was pre-Alpha. Not as far as people think, actually. It stopped on the PlayStation because we became a second party of Nintendo. We had intentionally planned on bringing it to the GameCube all along once we became a second party; the timing just never worked out. Once we stopped the PlayStation version, we were never really actively in full development until the 360. We kicked some ideas around, and we did a couple of technology prototypes on the GameCube, but there was really no point at which I would say we had a full team on it, and it was definitely starting to move forward. Canonizing and talking about the story over the time has been just fantastic, and I think that gives us a real leg up as far as content goes. But as far as the actual full production goes, once we stopped the PlayStation version, we really didn't think about it nor was it ever in full production again until we moved it to the 360.
The funny thing is that the GameCube actually went online (Phantasy Star Online) before Xbox Live was released.
Sad that PSO was pretty much the only game that really used it (there was also the PSO card game and some Resident Evil co-op game, but I think that's about it), and that Nintendo's still not doing Online right.
Though it hasn't seen use in years, my GameCube still has the broadband adapter installed.
On 12 October 2007, 381 people gathered together at a mall in Parramatta, Sydney, Australia… each one brandishing their own Nintendo DS. Switching on and powering up their favorite games, they set the record for the largest handheld console party, featuring most DS players gathered together in one location at the same time.
