Gamer Connects 444 Consoles To Single TV, Sets World Record

Ibrahim Al-Nasser, a gaming enthusiast from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has set a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles connected to a single television, with 444 systems hooked up simultaneously.

Al-Nasser's collection spans five decades of gaming history, from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the 2023 PlayStation 5 Slim. It includes mainstream consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, as well as rare items such as the Super A'Can. To manage the complex setup, Al-Nasser employs over 30 RCA switchers and 12 HDMI switchers, along with various converters for older systems. He maintains an Excel spreadsheet detailing the location and activation procedure for each console. "After a while I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn't play," Al-Nasser said. "By adding more switchers, the idea came to my mind to connect all of the gaming consoles I have to the TV then contact Guinness World Records because this project is unique."

Engadget adds: He's even organized his collection so the cables aren't showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television. That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it's far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.

Whats his power bill like?

[rossdee]

If they were all powered up at the same time...

Re:

[doug141]

$1.50/hr to run them all. He'd need to spread them across half a dozen different circuit breakers. Unless he's wired at 220.

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[vlad30]

Saudi Electricity prices are among the cheapest https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

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[necro81]

$1.50/hr to run them all.

Probably need to double that, since the room with all those consoles will get wicked hot and need dedicated AC.

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[Malay2bowman]

The breaker would trip. Hopefully he has a power setup that would prevent too many consoles from being switched on at once and make sure that the power draw wouldn't come close to tripping the breaker.

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[Moryath]

It said they're connected. Nothing said they had to be on. And as John Oliver pointed out, if you're a hyper-rich asshole or a totalitarian despot with money to burn, Guinness will happily certify you a "world record" in anything [ew.com] because Guinness these days is a joke.

And that story went out before Guinness knuckled under to World's Biggest Fucking Cheater Billy Mitchell, [perfectpacman.com] too.

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[GrahamJ]

Yeah I was picturing a 444-way split screen :D

Can we get this guy

[dimko]

to be a porn director please? Pretty please? With cock cherry on top!?

Re:

[Powercntrl]

How does the ability to connect lots of game consoles to a single TV translate into making better porn? I'm gonna need this one explained to me, because either it's something I've missed because I don't watch straight porn, or it's just a bad joke.

Of course the amateur made stuff has all kinds of flaws, from filming with a potato, to having their lighting consisting entirely of RGB LEDs puking up a rainbow in front of the camera. Those folks need anyone with some experience in using a camera to tell them

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[ClickOnThis]

I'm not sure, but I think dimko's dream goes something like this:

Single TV = female lead
Gaming consoles = male co-stars

Yeah, it's lame.

Nice but

[buck-yar]

wouldn't he rather dismantle it and go 1 console to 1 screen now that he has the record? Some of those be better on CRTs, and surely all the connections introduces signal loss and lag.

Not really simultaneous

[Roger W Moore]

surely all the connections introduces signal loss and lag.

Doubtful - since the pictures show only one console on the screen at a time he's got a large, probably multilayer, switch so there may be distortion but not really much signal loss. However, I'm not sure it really counts as "simultaneously connected" since really he has a large switch that switches one console onto the main screen and disconnects all the rest. To really get the record you need to have a ~20x20 picture-in-picture. If you have an 8k resolution screen that will still be as much resolution as

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[war4peace]

In order for a 20x20 matrix on a single TV, the TV needs to be able to process 400 video stream simultaneously.
While there are PiP monitors (I own one) and rarely, PiP TVs (although it has become exceedingly rare to find one), from 2 to 400 is a very, VERY long way.

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[bn-7bc]

Or having the 30x20 mareix produced my dedicated hw and using the tv as a monitor for the output.

Multiplexers all the way down

[Roger W Moore]

You are not looking at the right solution. You can get video multiplexers typically aimed and security systems than can multiplex 4 or 16 (or sometimes more) channels and some of which support up to 4k resolution for the output although I could not find an 8k. If you chain those together (17x16 channels in two layers would get you 256, 5 layers of 341x4 channels gets you 512) you could put together a truly simultaneous video connection.

That would set a true simultaneous record and, more importantly with

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[war4peace]

Yes, but those are usually low resolution and low FPS.

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[Malay2bowman]

Even if the TV could somehow do all 400 at once at full rez, you would be looking at the burger menu from hell no matter how big the set was. Too much sensory input with most of it being rejected by the mind as noise. And it will always be a game of "Where's Waldo?" if you glance away too long and lose your place, and have to search through a massive array of ever changing display windows to get back to the one you had focus on.

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[badboy_tw2002]

That's a cool idea, but you still would need a few of those televisions to do it. 8 bit era would be no problem, but there were a few "higher" resolution modes even by N64 time, which means you'd start blowing your pixel budget, not to mention when you get to the 2000s and min framebuffer sizes were at least 640x480 (or even more for PAL). If big chunks of the collection stretched into HD era then you're definitely talking multiple 8Ks.

But even so, it feels doable with specific hardware to get all those s

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[Malay2bowman]

I think he has the switchers daisy chained, each one having an input dedicated to another switcher's output in the chain. So the spreadsheet probally shows something like S1-C S2-A S3-A S4-B going from the one at console to the one at the television. The console being hooked to the "C" input of the first switcher, and the last switcher being set to "B" for the chain of switchers that the console is connected to. Basically a tree arrangement with many branches. But my question is, does he have a drawer/sprea

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[Malay2bowman]

Better on CRTs, but that would just complicate things further. I don't think he was aiming for the 100% retro experience.

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[Powercntrl]

Somebody hire a hooker for this guy. Or something.

There's 8 billion humans on this rock. If a few of them would rather play with their toys than breed, that's not as big of a problem as you might imagine it to be.

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[Malay2bowman]

When that 8 billion number was announced, I cringed. Not only is the potential for violence incredibly high, but nature has ways of "thinning the herd" which is both gruesome and painful, and this leads to a lot of people being condemned to a suffering death.

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[cuda13579]

I'm sure plenty of people here have hobbies and collections, others would consider dumb. What this guy is doing, isn't much different than being a retro pc enthusiast. Connecting them all together probably seemed like a fun, attainable, challenge to him.

Duplicates?

[Paul Carver]

Are these all unique systems? I definitely wouldn't give credit for having multiple of the same system. I'm not sure I'd even give credit for older systems if either of these people owns a newer system that can play the older system's games.

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[m00sh]

“It includes hundreds of video game consoles, all different to each other."

Re: Duplicates?

[guruevi]

Lots of them are varieties on the same console. XBox has a variety of âsame hardware in different boxâ(TM). Impressive nonetheless.

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[damn_registrars]

Indeed. There is a picture on the Guiness site showing two different variations of the NES (the VCR-style that was the first American release, along with the top-loading style that came later) as just one case of the same console twice. IIRC the two NES decks were identical in capability, just the form factor differed.

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[Malay2bowman]

Also, the SNES has the Sattelaview which makes for a good display piece but that service was shut down decades ago rendering it useless.

Gill Bates:

[Tablizer]

"What? 443 should be enough for anyone!"

All that and the TV isn't a PVM / BVM (CRT)

[DarkFiber23]

He goes through all this cost and effort, and it's just some generic LCD TV? Most seriously invested retro gamers would go for Sony's Professional/Broadcast Video Monitors (P/BVM), as they display old games the way the game devs intended. Because LCD screens weren't in common use back in the day, game developers expected a certain level of smoothing which CRT screens would naturally apply. For that reason, most game developers designed their sprites on and for CRT displays. These high end Sony monitors just

This is nice, but

[John.Banister]

I encourage Mr. Al-Nasser to consider the splendor of simultaneously connecting one gaming super computer to 444 TVs.

And here I thought I was doing good...

[Chris Mattern]

...with eight.

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[Powercntrl]

Pretty much after I ran out of HDMI ports I called it quits. That's what emulation is for.

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[Chris Mattern]

I refused to give in and bought some A/V switches.

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[antdude]

At least, eight is a lucky number. Four isn't. Are you Chinese? ;)

Critiques

[TJHook3r]

First thought is, where's the CRT monitor? Surely the only choice for a serious retro setup. Second - where does he keep the gamepads? The thought of all those wires is bringing me out in a rash