What does playing "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2" for 135 hours looks like? As you can see from the photo above it looks ... not so good.
But hey, that's the price for setting a world record ... right? Right?
Okan Kaya of Sydney, Australia, spent the last seven days setting a new record for the longest marathon first-person shooter gaming session. He spent 135 hours and 50 minutes playing the new "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2" game.
His employer — computer cable company 4Cabling — has been documenting his progress on its website and its Facebook page. On Tuesday, his co-workers announced that Kaya, a sales manager, had not only set the record but had finished with a "Black Ops 2" career ranking of 29th among some 5 million players.
"It took 7 DAYS of mental & physical stamina & he crushed it!" his co-workers wrote on Facebook.
I checked in with the Guinness World Records office, which confirmed that Kaya did register his plans to make a run for the record. "While no Guinness World Records adjudicator was on site to verify, we await for Okan to send across all the necessary and required evidence across to in order for our records team to properly authenticate," a Guinness spokesperson said.
If everything looks good to the folks at Guinness, Kaya will have beaten the record previously held by Canadians Chris Gloyd and Timothy Bell, who played "Resistance" and "Resistance 2" for 120 hours and 7 minutes in March 2012.
Meanwhile, let's be thankful that Kaya is still alive to enjoy his new title. After all, other gamers haven't been so lucky after marathon play sessions. A 20-year-old gamer from England died from a pulmonary embolism after a lengthy gaming session. And a teen gamer in Taiwan died after a "Diablo 3" binge.
But it seems Kaya tackled at least some of the risks to his circulatory system by occasionally using a Stair Master while he was playing.
It seems that difficult task should warrant some kind of a world record of its own: World record for longest time spent gaming while walking in place perhaps?
- Via Wired
Winda Benedetti writes about video games for NBC News. You can follow her tweets about games and other things on Twitter here @WindaBenedetti and you can follow her on Google+. Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IN-GAME FACEBOOK PAGE to discuss the day's gaming news and reviews.