Reads as a typo. “Gamerscore Leaderboard. Rank one at +132,000 this month.” Surely, there must be some mistake. 132,000 achievement points in a month? There is no way! There has to be a hidden decimal point somewhere, right? From all angles, physically, chemically, intellectually, mathematics just doesn’t add up. You would need to average about 4,000 points per day. I mean, I’m lucky if I finish a single game in a month. This player not only licked me, but also turned off the stadium lights and spread the tarps.
The rest of the post says, “What quarantine did to my player score in March.” Sarah, who is 29 years old and asking me to use a pseudonym, got 1,800 votes in favor on the r / Xbox subreddit. People in the comments were surprised: “I thought getting 42,000 in a month was good, what the hell is this?” “Eight years later I am sitting at 20,000.” “HOW?”
It is undoubtedly one of the most puzzling feats in gaming history. Fortunately, she agreed to an interview over a call from Discord to explain her process.
Sarah has loved achievements since she got her first Xbox 360 in 2006, when the idea of a to-do meta-list was presented to the gaming public for every game you played. I remember a brief zeitgeist during that time; There were people who were stupefied because the studies asked us to open abstruse thresholds for points that had no fundamental value, and there were others who internalized the idea immediately. Sarah fell at the last camp.
“I picked up Gears of war, and I spent about three months going through 10,000 murders, hundreds of hours of multiplayer, ”she says. “Almost since then I have always watched the achievements of every game I play.”
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Sarah is primarily a PlayStation Trophy person these days. The PS4 is their favorite console, and Sony has done an excellent job of luring its users to higher levels of obsession with those real and rare Platinums. But she is also a member of what she calls a “Gamerscore League” on the XboxAchievements.com website. In early March, that league launched a competition: whoever ends the month with the highest net point gain wins the victory. (Participants competed in pairs, adding the sum total of their achievements for a final score.) These informal tournaments are quite common (I remember them for 360 days), but Sarah felt she had to set a world record. 132,000 points would eclipse any other month-long gain in the history of the Gamerscore League. I mean, she worked hard the first Gears of war and its paper-thin multiplayer for an eternity in the quest for exactly 50 points. If anyone could do it, it was her.
Of course, the first week of March became feverish, as a global destabilizing pandemic took hold in North America, and we all began to understand how different life would be. No, Sarah had no free time. She works as an accountant, and when the office closed and prepared for the impact, she was instructed to record her 40 hours a week from home. Her monumental campaign of achievement was not won due to a sudden abundance of free time. Instead, she learned to maximize free moments in the midst of her usual turns.
“I was doing my same job, but I have a player setup, so I had to bring my work laptop, plug it in, and go,” he says. “What the quarantine did was it eliminated a lot of time I spent preparing for work. All that time can be turned into playtime, if I so choose. I didn’t go to social events. I was stuck at home with just a hobby. “
Scroll through Sarah TrueAchievements Profile, and you will begin to understand how it got here. The vast majority of its 132,000 points come from small independent projects with no budget, those that come from the forlorn depths of the board market. I mean, even the most read fans in the industry are unaware of games like Mushroom hunt, red bow, and Thunder legBut Sarah went through each one with remarkable efficiency. No one was going to climb this mountain squeezing points from Resident Evil 2. Sarah worked smarter, not harder.
“I spent some free time at work compiling a spreadsheet of each game that can be completed very quickly. It ended up being about 200 games. I accumulated them from faster to slower, and bought them as I went along, ”she says. “Independent games are usually the shortest. There is a publisher called Ratalaika. They launch a weekly game that can be completed in about an hour for 1,000 points. I played about 60 of those. “
Sarah decided to assign a loose rating to each game she played, as a way to get a short survey of the quality of the average microscopic indie. Seventy percent of them, she says, scored five or less. The facts are clear: It is not an especially pleasant experience to deal with a million downloads of $ 5.
“There was a game called In 1995 that was the worst game I played that month, ”he laughs. “The controls are terrible. Graphics are terrible. It gave me a migraine. It was like a dollar store Demonic resident.“(On the other hand, Sarah recommends Aer: Memories of yesteryear like a hidden gem)
That said, Sarah makes it clear that this routine was not all cheese. For example, she is a great Dark souls fan. She has won the game countless times, but had never made the journey through Lordran on an Xbox platform. Many of us remember our first completion of From Software’s magnificent melancholy treatise with a mixture of salt, agony, fear, and finally a spark of euphoria. It is not a stay where I intend to embark again any time soon. But that is not the case with Sarah. Dark souls It is child’s play at this point. She tells me that she went through the game in nine and a half hours, collecting 1,000 points for her problems.
In all, Sarah committed about six hours a day to her Gamerscore career on weekdays, and about 12 hours on weekends. She was actually behind for most of the tournament, but regained enough ground in the past five days to enshrine her place among the gods. On the last day of the event, she says she broke her own record for most Gamerscore achieved in a 24-hour period: 29,000.
“I set a goal and was able to do it with three hours remaining in the event,” she says. “When I posted it on Reddit, people were saying, ‘That’s more Gamerscore than I’ve gotten in 12 years.’ It was great to receive all these compliments that may sound crazy, but it’s pretty normal for me. “
Sarah’s partner during the tournament contributed an additional 84,000 during the month, for a cumulative total of 219,000, resulting in a gap of 70,000 points between his team and the second classified. That alone is enough to last a lifetime, but as a career obsessive, Sarah is not done. She has returned to her usual PS4. She’s still trying to get all the trophies, as she probably will be for life. At the beginning of the quarantine, we all talked about how this could be the opportunity to achieve some of the inner ambitions that have occupied our dreams. Maybe we were finally going to read The corridor of poweror make a Spelunky Eggplant Run or finish that long-ignored script in the sediment of our Google Docs. But most of us quickly realized that it was easy to succumb to the paralysis of the moment; I have been woefully unproductive. So congratulations to Sarah. Shakespeare there could be written King lear during the plague, but your player score should be the next best blocking achievement.
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego, currently living in Brooklyn. In addition to Kotaku, he contributes with Vice, PC Gamer, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Polygon.
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