NY man's 10,607 video games secure Guinness title


BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Maybe it was getting his first video game, Cosmic Avenger, for Christmas at age 12, and then having to wait an entire year for the hard-to-land Colecovision console to play it on that made Michael Thomasson so determined to get his hands on every video game and system he could find.

Now, 31 years and roughly 11,000 games later, Thomasson is the newly crowned world record holder for having the largest collection of video games. He is featured in a two-page spread in the just-released "Guinness World Records 2014 Gamer's Edition."

"I have games on cartridge, laser disc. I have VHS-based games, cassette-based games," Thomasson said, standing among the collection that fills the basement of his suburban Buffalo home.

Along with the games, he has the devices to play them on, not only the Xboxes and PlayStations but obscure ones like the Casio Loopy, the only game system specifically geared toward girls, which came out in Japan in 1995, and the Pippin, a dud released by Apple the same year.

"Every game on it is awful," Thomasson says of Apple's foray into the gaming world. "It's the least fun of anything in the house."