The Fastest-Selling Portable Gaming System: Guinness said Apple moved 1.5 million iPhone 4 units on the first day of availability, making it the fastest selling portable gaming system in history. This company compared it to Sony selling 200,000 PlayStation Portables on launch day in 2005 and Nintendo taking a week to move its first 500,000 units. Not addressed is the percentage of those first 1.5 million customers that actually play games on their iPhones.
The Most Popular Application Marketplace: For this title, Guinness cited Apple’s 6.5 billion downloads — which we’ll note is almost enough app downloads for everyone on the planet to have an iOS app — as proof the App Store is the world’s most popular application market place.
The company wrote, “As of September 2010 it hosts 259,470 apps for purchase of free download (a further 50,000 apps that were once available through the service have been discontinued). Of the apps currently available, 61 are flatulence simulators, a genre that includes such masterpieces as Fart Machine, Fart Ocarina [Not currently available – TMO] and iFart – Epic Rip Edition.”
The Largest Downloadable Video Game Store: Guinness said that the App Store had 37,362 games for download as of September 2010, making it the largest downloadable video game store.
“By comparison,” Guinness wrote, “PC games download service Steam offers around 1,110 titles, the Xbox Live Indie Arcade has slightly more at 1,300 and the Japanese Virtual Console store for Wii offers 576 titles covering a good chunk of the back catalogues of both Sega and Nintendo.”
The Largest Launch Line-up of Any Gaming System: The fourth Apple title is the sketchiest of the lot. Guinness said that Apple launched the App Store with 500 titles in July of 2008, and that 145 of them were games. Thus the award. Congrats, Apple.
Other headline grabbing titles in the Gamer’s Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records include Angry Birds being named Top Paid-For App Store Game in Most Countries, Plants vs. Zombies being named the Fastest-Selling iPhone/iPod Strategy Game, and Tap Tap Revenge being named Most Popular iPhone Game Series.
In addition, two unassailable “Firsts” were named that involved the iPhone, though we’re not sure why either would qualify as world records. Frotz was named First Text Adventure Engine for iPhone and Enigmo was named First Physics-Based Puzzle Game on iPhone.
Hey, do you remember when Potzy was trying to win a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records by lining up quarters on his arm and then catching them? Those were happy days indeed.