Two Guinness World Records Smashed in Support of Extra Life
Congrats to Douglas Spears and David Swick III who both just earned World Record Titles while also supporting Extra Life! Both Douglas and David support the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and they teamed up to support each other in their World Record attempt. From February 16-17, they produced the “Breaking Records World Tour” held at the Game Arena in Columbus.
Douglas set his world record sights on Rock Band aiming to drum for the longest time. The previous Rock Band drumming record was 26 hours and 40 minutes, but Douglas exceeded this by over an hour, playing Rock Bank for 27 hours 46 minutes and 21 seconds. Along the way, he never took his sights off of fundraising and managed to raise over $1,361 USD for Columbus’ kids. David also focused on his World Record gameplay at the same time, but he aimed to break the Pokemon video game record. The previous record was just 24 hours and David smashed this by playing for 28 hours 1 minute and 22 seconds! (He exceeded his 26 hours goal and made it look easy.) He also managed to raise $540 USD #ForTheKids.
Earning local news coverage, these Extra Lifers ensured that people all across the Columbus area learned about Extra Life’s playful and joyful approach to fundraising. This bonding experience deepened relationships, reaching joyful high peaks and collectively raised nearly $2,000 USD!
Guinness allows you to take a short bathroom break for every hour played, although the two men didn’t take advantage of their maximum break time. They opted to just graze on food while playing their games, Douglas ate between songs while Rock Band was loading and David ate with one hand while playing with the other. You can check out all of the action in this Twitch stream.
The two will be mailing off documentation of their efforts to Guinness to review (they filmed and streamed the entire event), and they they expect to be featured in 2021 Gamer’s edition of the Guinness World Records book. This isn’t the first time an Extra Lifer has broken a Guinness World Record. In fact, just a few months ago, Ryan Clancy from Milwaukee broke the pinball world record as part of his 2019 Game Day strategy. We know so many Extra Lifers are die-hard players at such a wide variety of games with incredible endurance capacity. In fact, Douglas explained that “yearly game day marathons have helped our mental stability during the record breaking. [David and I] have been doing game day together for years now, so we have learned how to feed off of each other’s energy. For me, I have also been doing personal training with my gym for about a year now making sure my endurance was up, and my trainer made sure I was doing proper forearm/wrist exercises to keep up with the physical demands.”
Why not consider reaching out to Guinness to see if you can set your own record and make a difference for local kids?
Don’t forget to sign up for Extra Life to help sick and injured kids in hospitals around the US and Canada by playing games!