36 hrs thats good going.arcades in the uk never opened 24/7 I managed about 300 levels before it was closing time my local opened 8am - 10pm.
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I finally committed to reaching level 1000 on MAME a few years ago, and I certainly was not expecting that level 8 rollover!!!
But with a family needing constant attention (as they do!), I had to space mine out over a few days, and in preparing for that, dispelled a rumor that your health rolled over to zero after 99999.
Think I'll set some time aside and record a run soon . See how far I get before running out of steam.i will assume marathon rules would apply regarding breaks?
Those are some impressive scores! The highest level I ever got was 600 something, playing with a buddy and with continues. :) Many, many hours of playing.
RTM REPLY - this is best answered by Jace, but the "marathon rules" that currently apply in the "new TG" do not necessarily match those with Guinness, so ask yourself this up front...is your intended marathon for strictly TG submission, or also (potentially) Guinness ?
If so then I suppose you will want to be fully sure of what both expectations are.
The original TG rules allowed for a "break" every 2 hours of 15 minutes which could be banked up to 2 consecutive hours. Then some changes to TG happened and I really do not know what the current "rules" are now.
Technically speaking it comes down to expectations. If by "break" that means you can do anything you want, and if by "play" that means that you must be actively in front of the game (i.e. not away from it), then in theory for a game like "Gauntlet" nothing is stopping you from sitting in front of the game for 3+ straight hours doing absolutely nothing. If you've ever been deep into the game where you've accumulated many tens of thousands of health and then enter the treasure room you know what I mean by this.
There were discussions at some point between the then (pre-2007) "Board of Referees" to eliminate the "break rule"...we figured if the gamer felt like being away from a game in-progress where lives/health were constantly being lost then so be it. Again, the issue is whether TG was beholden to "Guinness Rules" which were quite different.
The formal pre-2007 marathon rules are contained somewhere within the TG forum, I just cannot remember where. But what the rules are now may differ widely.
The intent of the original "marathon" rules was to keep an apples-to-apples environment for all marathoners.
Some titles are more conducive to marathons than others. Break-time/opportunity is plentiful for a number of reasons, and risk to life/ship/health loss is less critical than in other titles. As such, it would not be fair to consider a game as having been "marathoned" if a player could sleep/break for 6 hours every 24 as opposed to a game where a player could sleep/break for practically maybe just 3 hours every 24. Same applies to a title where a player could easily just walk away for hours on end and pick up fresh after a good sleep.
On the opposite end were titles like "Centipede" where the notion of marathoning the game (without usage of a trick) was highly improbable due to the low number of reserve lives and how quickly they deplete when the game is left unattended.
Not all the "rules" governed break/sleep time, however.
Some rules were intended to ensure that there was fair play involved...
-> Single credit only
-> Single player only (unless the nature of the marathon was 2-player such as "Joust")
-> No 3rd party involvement that could enhance/supplement gameplay performance...this largely had to deal with other gamers keeping track of your lives/cities/etc, moving your hand/arm if you were starting to nod off while playing, etc
There were other "rules" but some of them were just to keep things on the up-and-up (such as under what circumstances could a 3rd party touch the controls during your performance and what the constraints were if they did, such as replacing the entire control panel mid-gameplay).
Other "rules" were utter nonsense...older TG gamers are well aware of the infamous "P-Bucket Rule" which was completely unenforceable and only intended for show purposes to make it seem like TG was "as serious as" (Guiness/The Olympics) when it came to marathon adjudication. The reality was that TG had no right to impose such a "rule", period...and in one famous instance the "bucket" and its accompanying content was somehow misplaced post-marathon. You have to laugh at these old anecdotes in the here and now.