George Leutz Q*Bert World Record Attempt

philt80

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George Leutz just woke from his slumber on the floor of Richie Knucklez arcade, and is currently going after the Q*Bert world record.
The former(heavily debated) record of 33,273,520 was set in 1983 by Rob Gerhardt and has remained since.

If Rick Carter's incredible high-paced attempt last month is any indication, this should take George 60+ hours to complete....a monumental task indeed.

Watch live at: http://www.twitch.tv/richieknucklez
 
I took a peek - 460,000 and a looonng way to go. Good Luck!
 
4.7 million right now.

I don't know how people do this. After an hour sitting and playing DK, my back hurts!
 
Qbert

It's quite impressive watching him play.... I love Q*bert and hope to have the machine someday. He's over 5.6 million now. Go Man Go!
 
7 million.

Love watching the world record attempts. You can learn a lot watching the pros play. My gameplay got 20x better after watching John McAllister on Joust last year.

Gotta love Q*Bert. That game got the most play at our Christmas party this year. Couldn't get my sister-in-law off it.
 
I'm so glad I saw this thread today. I pretty much finished up at noon today, but now I got something to watch for the rest of the day. Watching these are really interesting because it looks so easy. 7.67 mil and climbing. Good luck George!!!
 
He would have broken the record last time, but didnt someone trip on the cord and unplug the machine after an ungodly amount of time into it?
 
He would have broken the record last time, but didnt someone trip on the cord and unplug the machine after an ungodly amount of time into it?

No, that was his first attempt in April. If memory serves, that game ended at around 18 million points, which would have been about 36 hours in. His second attempt was in May and ended at 24.7 million (54 hrs). Third attempt was July and that ended at 26.9 million (60.5 hrs). Fourth attempt's a charm!
 
Is someone keeping tally of lives earned and lost? Or is it just estimated? I heard them talking about 100-man breaks, just curious how that's tracked in marathons.

The boards/discs always have the same layout too - at what round/level does that start?

LeChuck
 
I don't have the attention span to do anything for 60 hours straight. Good luck to him.
 
Is someone keeping tally of lives earned and lost? Or is it just estimated? I heard them talking about 100-man breaks, just curious how that's tracked in marathons.

It's easiest to track only deaths. You know how many lives you start with (3), you earn the first extra life at 8,000 points, and you earn each additional life every 14,000 points after that. So you can compute how many lives you'd have at any point threshold assuming a perfect game (no deaths). For games that do not display all extra lives on screen marathoners typically make up a huge table ahead of time to assist with tracking. When you reach a specific point threshold just reference your chart to find the total number of lives and then subtract however many lives you've lost. You can keep a rough count in your head that way.

For taking breaks usually the number of lives lost during the break is just estimated based on time away from the machine. On Q*bert you lose a man every 15-17 seconds you are away, so roughly 4 deaths per minute. Late in the game he'll be able to take a 25-minute power nap to stave off distorted vision and hallucinations and he'll shed about 100 lives.

Q*Bert is kinda unique in that the number of extra lives that can be held in storage is absolutely huge, estimated to be over 300,000. (See this thread for a code disassembly and computation by Don Hodges.) So thankfully there are no concerns about rolling the extra lives counter back to zero like on Robotron or Nibbler. The better you do on Q*bert the first 36-40 hours or so when you're relatively fresh, the more lives you'll have in storage, so you can afford to take breaks more frequently the second night and the third day, when the going gets really rough.

The boards/discs always have the same layout too - at what round/level does that start?

Each level has four rounds. The current level number and round number are displayed at the upper-right of the screen. I'm not a Q*bert expert but I believe level 9 just repeats at some point, so you see the same four rounds for level 9 over and over again.
 
And he's staring down about 36 more hours of gameplay if I calculated correctly - incredible!

More like 47-49 more hours to go. He's been playing 21 hours so far. His scoring pace will slow after 40 hours or so, and there will be breaks for food, sleep, restroom, etc.
 
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