The second world record received acknowledges UnReal World as a forefather of the genre.
So...
Back in 2016 we got (and proudly hold) the record for longest update support for a videogame in GWR Gamer's Edition 2017.
And now, in the recently published Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2019 UnReal World gets the record for "First open-world survival videogame". Oops, we kind of created a videogame genre, but we do not regret :)
The book happily presented at the end of this post is a Finnish edition, and here's how GWR mentions the record in English:
"The second millennial decade has witnessed an explosion of open-world survival games, particularly on the Steam platform with the success of PC tiles such as DayZ, Ark: Survival Evolved and the battle-royale shooter PlayerUnknown's Battlegrouds. The genre's trues roots can most likely be traced back to the indie sandbox RPG UnReal World, first released in 1992. Set in Iron Age Finland, player's principal aim was to survive its challenging and harsh environments. Incredibly, the game was still going strong and receiving updates, as of September 2017. The game was developed by two people - head creator Sami Maaranen and programmer Erkka Lehmus (both Finland). As of September 2017, it held the record for longest update support for a videogame."
(Yeah, it's out-of-date info with latest updates as the books live in press-time info. And in case somebody wonders about the near future updates a new bugfix and balancing patch is actually to be released this month.)
Cheers and thanks to all of you for making history and taking part in creation of a videogame genre with us.
Erkka (co-designer) at the left, Sami (creator) and Alli (the cat) at the right.
And if you take a look at our previous GWR post it seems like have started a tradition with these world record promo pictures as well ;)
