Still nothing good to play —
Ibrahim Al-Nasser said he got tired of juggling plugs just to play his collection.
Those of us who collect classic game consoles and computers (here's looking at you, AI reporter Benj Edwards) know the difficulty of keeping all that hardware not just working but instantly accessible with a simple press of a power button. Too often, large hardware collections end up languishing, boxed up on shelves, or sitting loose and unconnected to a display for long periods.
Saudi Arabia's Ibrahim Al-Nasser grew tired of having that problem with his massive gaming collection, so he decided to hook 444 different gaming devices up to a single TV, earning a Guinness World Record in the process.
"After a while, I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn’t play," Al-Nasser said in a video filmed by Guinness. "The TV ports are limited, and if I want to play, I either unplug the existing consoles or I'll keep everything and add more switchers and of course more converters as well. 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."
Guinness says Al-Nasser makes use of "more than 12" HDMI switchers (so... 13?) to keep his collection connected, as well as "over 30" RCA switchers for pre-HD consoles (though some older consoles, like an N64 used in the video, apparently make use of converters for an HD connection). While the HD consoles seem to automatically switch to the correct input when turned on, Al-Nasser uses a massive spreadsheet to keep track of which button to push on which RCA switcher to connect the right cables.
Wait, there are 444 consoles?
Enlarge / A Nintendo-heavy section of Al-Nasser's collection.
Al-Nasser's collection seems quite extensive, including both common modern consoles and relative rarities like the Asia-exclusive Super A'Can. To get to a record-setting count of 444, though, Al-Nasser had to include a lot of non-traditional "game consoles," including cheap plug-and-play devices, mini-console re-releases, gaming computers, Android-based HDMI sticks, "consolized arcades," and more.
That's all good enough to count for Guinness, which has faced controversy for letting would-be record holders pay for a chance at glory. In the gaming world, it famously removed and then reinstated Billy Mitchell's scoring records amid a lawsuit threat.
Even if the hardware count feels a bit inflated, Al-Nasser definitely deserves credit for keeping so many pieces of gaming hardware clean and well-organized without any of the sloppy cable clutter you might expect. "I use all the tools available in the market... to organize the cables," he said. "It's like a museum, that's why it took too much time for me [to organize]."