According to Guinness, I'm the world record holder.
I'm the person who has played for longest (30hrs 10mins) AND fulfilled all of their additional criteria relating to how it is recorded and verified.
The difficult part was fulfilling all of their criteria. Some tasker has detailed, but in addition you should be unknown to any of the verifiers, and they should be 'experts in their field'. I was in discussion with Guinness for many months beforehand explaining that as I was the UK pinball league coordinator, there wasn't enough people in the country who could be considered experts who I didn't know. They settled on 1 expert, who I could know, along with one other, who I couldn't know who was a judge, barrister, Dr or the like. As I work in a hospital that made things easier.
The venue also has to be open to the public for the duration and free. Again, doing the event in the hospital solved that problem.
Having to have the whole thing recorded continuously, which also must include a clock in view, made things a little trickier but it got done.
You can also not remove your hands from the flippers during the attempt, other than to plunge the ball, is another of their rules I challenged - and came to a compromise.
The hardest part about doing it in the hospital was that the IT guys wouldn't let the person streaming connect to the hospital Internet nor use his PC amid security concerns, but they eventually found a way round it.
The actual playing was the easy part. I stopped at 30hrs, not because I was tired but a combination of having to clear the machines out of the foyer by a set time, having ran out or witnesses and to only go a little above the existing record to give others the chance to break the record.
This was after all primarily a fund raising and awareness event for Prostate Cancer, the record was just a way to get in the papers and help publicise it.
I would encourage anybody who is considering to break the Guinness record to put all of the effort possible in taking sure you fulfill their rules, the playing will come naturally.
Other tips.
You accrue 5 mins of break every FULL, CONTINUOUS hour of play. I intended to play for 4 hrs sessions and earn 20mins. Using 10 for a comfort break and banking the other 10, after 20 hrs that would have given me an hour break which I was going to try and take a power nap. As it happened I had to use virtually all of that hour to fix an issue with the drop targets.
Don't plan on large meals, I constantly snacked with bite size items and drank tea continuously through the duration.
Don't go throwing the machine around to make saves, it's not a high score comp. Save your energy.
You will get bored, I had a Twitch live stream set up so I could speak to people and read their comments. At about 5am GMT (17hrs in) the chat had died down and I was getting bored, tired and feeling like I could give up. The money was already banked and I had raised lots of awareness. I thought I'd call my sister in NYC for a pep talk. As I did I muted the microphone song could have a private conversation. Within seconds I had people messaging me that the sound had gone off and was their a problem. Knowing that there were people all over the world watching, even if they hadn't commented previously, made me certain that I would complete the challenge.
TLDR Who is the world heavyweight boxing champion? Depending on which governing body you hold in the highest esteem will determine your answer.
As I see it everyone who does a marathon like this to raise money for charity is a winner, doing it just to claim to be the world record holder, not so much.
