Filled with rusty meet hooks, jumping snakes, and the odd retractable bridge over a pit of bubbling lava, video game real estate isn’t exactly burning up the market. Well, in some cases it is, but only literally.
When most of us think of a long session spent playing a single game, we think of spending a day or maybe a weekend immersed in story or competition. Eight or 10 hours, maybe more, spent on the couch or at a PC while the player loses track of time.
If George Leutz hasn’t gone completely Ahab already, I’d advise him to let go of the Q*Bert world record. His latest assault on the mark, whose 33 million score is believed to require more than 70 hours of non-stop gameplay, ended in exhaustion after 57 hours, 40 minutes on a single quarter at the joystick. His final score was 26,721,915.
It was estimated that George Leutz would have to play Q*Bert for more than 70 hours -nearly three days straight- to break a 28-year-old all-time world record. If you, like me, wondered if there was some way to stick Q*Bert in the corner of the board and grab a nap during the record attempt, evidently there isn’t.
Last month, George Leutz set out to topple a high score nearly 28 years old: Q*Bert‘s all time mark of 33,273,520. It’s believed that it would take playing for 70 hours on a single quarter to beat that score. Halfway into it, someone kicked a power cord, (seen above) and all of Leutz’s work was lost.
Thirty-six hours into what was expected to be a 70-hour assault on an all-time world record, and with hundreds of lives to spare, someone unplugged a cabinet elsewhere in the arcade, resetting the Q*bert George Leutz was playing.
Cracked takes a thoughtful look at what five iconic v8-bit video game characters would look like if their sprites were magically granted life. The results are just a wee bit disturbing.
We’ve seen dodgy, unlicensed games on Apple’s App Store before. But rarely have we seen a dodgy, unlicensed game that takes the words “copyright infringement” to heart quite like CuBert.
