A UCF student broke a Guinness World Record over the weekend and his organization managed to raise thousands of dollars for charity in the process.
One of UCF’s own students, Jason Diehl, also known as Gahtzu, broke the current world record for “Longest Video Games Marathon Playing a Fighting Game” after playing ‘Super Smash Bros’ for over 72 hours.
Diehl, a member of the Gaming Knights at UCF, is one of the highest ranked players in Florida and has been playing the “Super Smash Bros” game series from a very young age with friends — starting by playing with characters like ‘Fox’ and ‘Mario.’
“When I would lose, I would get upset so I would fight them again. I was always very competitive,” Diehl said.
Diehl says training for this was not that hard for him and as he was trying to play as far as 72 hours. This past summer, he did two trial runs to get a feeling of what the actual day would be like — passing the 55 hour mark both times.
“I did a few trial runs in the past and my body is already kind of primed for staying up all night. During my freshman and sophomore years, I would kind of just play melee all night, skip class and all that stuff so this isn’t like a forced stress to me at all. So I think I’m pretty mentally and physically prepared for it.” Diehl said before the event.
Playing for that many hours may have seemed like the hard part but there are also some other rules that Guinness had, such as having to push a button every 20 seconds and having witnesses every 4 hours.
But how exactly did he go the bathroom and what if he got tired? Each hour, he was allowed 10 minutes of break time but his trick was to accumulate them all for when he really needed them and was feeling tired.
Besides Jason Diehl, many other top Smash players from around the United States and even from right here in Florida traveled to the event, which began on Aug. 22, 2014 at 2:08 PM and ended on Aug. 24.
On top of winning the record, the student organization which hosted the event was able to raise over $13,500 benefiting St. Jude’s.
