Guinness World Records has begun claiming ownership of Super Mario Bros. speedrun challenges on YouTube

Update: Acknowledging the massive cock-up, Guinness is totally sorry for accidentally claiming ownership of multiple Super Mario Bros. speedrun videos.

Original story follows below:

I hate to break it to you, but you’re never going to hold a Guinness World Record unless you’re athletically or financially gifted enough to just buy one. That’s not to say that there isn’t some hope on the horizon though! For those of you willing to pour every single ounce of your being into a moment of perfection, you can achieve immortality via the video game route.

Or more specifically, the speedrun route. There’s no shortage of games with which to ply your speedy trade in, finding the quickest route between checkpoints and setting a new world record. If you’re looking for true video game immortality though, you’ll want to focus on the golden age of retro titles, braving the game design of sadistic levels as you shave seconds off the clock.

In the world of Super Mario Bros., that record belongs to Kosmic. One of the hardest games in existence to beat in under 20 minutes, Kosmic’s record now stands at a blistering 18 minutes and 59 seconds. You can’t get much better than that, and Kosmic deserves the kudos for his run which will likely never be toppled.

So great is the record, that Kosmic actually holds a Guinness World Record for it, having achieved the milestone without the use of warp pipes and breaking a record that had existed for over twelve years:

Kudos from the internet, a place in the Guinness World Record book and on to new challenges, right? Not exactly. Having been interviewed recently by Guinness, Kosmic woke up a few mornings ago to find that a large chunk of Super Mario Bros. content had now been slapped with a copyright claim by Guinness. YouTuber Karl Jobst has all the details in the video below:

In a nutshell, Guinness has cocked up massively. By claiming that their video featuring Kosmic and footage of his run (that he supplied them on request) is theirs to monetise and copyright, they’ve effectively claimed all Super Mario Bros. speedrun footage as theirs. Because the golden path to a sub-20 minute run follows a very tight route, video content from challengers all looks the same and is thus picked up by YouTube’s Content IDs algorithms, creating a tsunami effect of monetisation claims and matching content.

It’s likely the result from someone at Guinness being inattentive on the copyright side (it’s frighteningly easy to do so from the new YouTube studio toolset), which has seen hundreds of Speedrunners and organisations wake up to see their content flagged and essentially taken away from them. Guinness just won several world records for biggest gaming cock-up of the year, amongst several other categories from angry Super Mario Bros. speedrunners.