For those of you that don’t know, Twin Galaxies is the offical site for the world records of gaming. The info from this site is also used by Guinness World Records. All of this was started by a man named Walter Day. He was a former oil executive that had opened an arcade in 1981 called Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Iowa because he just wanted a reason to play video games. Day had read an issue of Time in 1982 where the cover story was about the growing popularity of video games. The story focused on a few high scores that people had made in some arcade games and inspired Day to create a leaderboard in his arcade of all the records from around the country.

This leaderboard grew very quickly; within 6 months, Day was receiving about 50 to 75 calls a day from players all over the world trying to submit their high score. Day started tracking scores for hundreds of games. There was so much popularity from the high scores, Ottumwa, Iowa was declared the official “Video Game Capital of the World” by its mayor. This popularity never died, people began coming to that arcade just to make an attempt at a record high score. This grew for years into a web site and into the offical scores for the Guinness World Records. Because of all of this, the International Video Game Hall of Fame & Museum will open up later this year in Ottumwa, Iowa.

If you want to find out more about Walter Day and the history of records in gaming, check out these excellent movies Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade & The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Everyone loves leaderboards in their games and strives to be on top. Next time you are looking at your score on one, give some props to Walter Day because he started it all. Thanks man!