Dedication (and the ability to stare at a screen for eight hours straight)’s what you need

According to the italicised small-print at the bottom of my work diary, Friday 8 February is notable for one reason. “The largest hovercraft was launched at Cowes, Isle of Wight, in 1968.” This makes you wonder what the fucking hell they were smoking round at Collins HQ when it came to selecting nuggets of trivia for 2008.

Who on earth cares about giant hovercrafts? In all honesty, when is the last time that you even had a discussion about hovercrafts, let alone really big hovercrafts? It’s alarmingly niche. And even if you did have an abiding interest in large hovercrafts, surely the salient information would be to tell us how big the hovercraft is, not where it was launched. If the largest hovercraft was the size of Belgium, it might be worth knowing.

Oh wow, in writing that I’ve just unearthed a repressed memory. When I was about six years old I got some new school shoes. It wasn’t until I got into the playground the next day that I inspected my shoes a bit more closely and realised that just on the top of the shoe’s tongue was a little leather panel. Embossed on this panel were the words: “The pilot of a Phantom travels at over 1,400mph”.

Again, you need to question what sort of people sit around in a shoe factory, look at their latest product and feel that it comes up short. “Look, you guys can tell me if this is way out of the left field, but maybe if we inserted some trivia about the Phantom plane on to the tongue of the shoe, it would give it that little extra something?” As a result I spent the next six weeks desperately scuffing my shoes in fear that other kids would find that I had trivia secreted about my person, think it was too odd (which, let’s face it, it was) and set about punching my face off.

I’d managed to forget about that whole thing and then Collins start in with their large hovercraft craziness.

Anyway, the original point of this post was to say that Friday 8 February is a rather momentous day, for it marks the release of the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition . It’s an entire book dedicated to commemorating the achievements of computer-game designers and enthusiasts, full of tips, trivia and information about every computer console and genre of game you can think of. It’s the Nerds’ Hall of Fame, basically.

To commemorate this piece of publishing genius and to try to appease the mildly interesting trivia ghouls that seem to be haunting me, you have a chance to win 10 copies of the book and one winner will receive the computer game of their choice.

To be in with a chance of winning, there follow five pieces of trivia culled from the book, however, two have been heavily edited to make them incredibly false. If you can spot which two are fictitious then email Arena and you can win big and won’t that be sw33t.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog was originally called Mr Needlemouse

2: The average age of a video-game player is 33.

3: The concept of an end-of-level baddie who get progressively harder to beat was first used by Shakespeare in Macbeth II.

4: The highest grossing one day game is Halo 3 which generated $170 million worth of sales in the USA alone

5: The worst movie-to-game release, as voted for by gamers, was Driving Miss Daisy.