Mike Morhaime (CEO) and Paul Sams (COO) accepted the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition award for World of Warcraft as the most popular MMORPG with 11.6 million subscribers; and for StarCraft, the best selling strategy game for PC with over 9.5 million copies sold worldwide.

Elsewhere in E3, Gaz and Matt had the opportunity to meet up with some of the people who have made massive, record-breaking contributions to videogaming, and who have featured in Gamer’s Edition, and present them with their Guinness World records certificates. First up, Gaz presented the certificates to Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams of Blizzard Entertainment, creators of World of WarCraft, the massively multiplayer game with the most subscribers and the fastest-selling PC game of all time.

GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® ANNOUNCES AWARDS AT E3 EXPO™ CONVENTION

Nintendo, Activision, Red Octane, Bethesda, Blizzard&Microsoft make their way into the Guinness World Records 2010 Gamers Edition

LOS ANGELES-June 5th, 2009- On the heels of February’s launch of the annual Guinness World Records 2009 Gamer’s Edition, representatives were on hand at the E3 Expo this week to honor gaming publishers with brand new records.

Guinness World Record recipients included Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Wii Sports, who received the record for the Best Selling Video Game with sales of 45.7 million to date.

Major Nelson and Mark Whitten from XBOX LIVE received the award for the Most Popular Online Console Gaming Service during Monday night’s Microsoft party. Xbox Live serves 20 million active subscribers to date, representing 67% of the total install base as of May 2009.

Blizzard Entertainment’s Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams accepted the records for World of Warcraft for the Most Popular MMORPG with a total of 11.6 million subscribers and Starcraft for being the Best Selling Strategy Game for a PC, selling 9.5 million copies worldwide.

Bethesda Softworks’ Lead Designer Todd Howard was awarded with the record for the Fastest-selling Multi Platform RPG after Fallout 3 sold over 4.7 million copies in its first week on sale from October 28th to November 4th 2008.

The entire Infinity Ward team were officially presented with the record for the Most Played Online Video Game as Call of Duty 4 has an excess of 15 million minutes played daily and the up and coming US band The Dares performed the First concert to Take Place Simultaneously in the Real and Virtual Worlds in SOE’s new massively multiplayer game Free Realms

In addition Charles and Kai Huang of Red Octane received the accolade for the Best-selling Rhythm Game Series for Guitar Hero’s sales of in excess of 25 million copies.

An honorable mention goes out to Steve Wiebe who unsuccessfully tried to win back his Donkey Kong crown from Billy Mitchell. Guinness World Records and Twin Galaxies were on hand to witness the potential new record. Wiebe’s final score of 989, 400 points fell short of the 1,050,200 score achieved by Mitchell in 2007.

All of the publishers validated at this year’s show will make their mark on history and will be featured in the Guinness World Records 2010 Gamers Edition which will launch early next year. The book itself contains a comprehensive guide to gaming and will feature the latest gaming records, the history behind gaming, and interviews with key figures in the industry.

Photo: To the left (Mike Morhaime - Blizzard President).  To the right (Paul Sams - Senior Vice-President of Business Operations)

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