The Race To One Million Gamerscore

[eddie tubs]

www.gameinformer.com
Microsoft recently announced Xbox Live discounts for players who have achieved gamerscores of 3,000, 10,000, and 25,000. It's great to see Microsoft rewarding players for their in-game accomplishments, but the tiers are laughably low, especially when you take into account that two Xbox Live users currently have scores over 750,000, and are racing to reach 1,000,000.

Raymond Cox, who games under the Xbox Live handle Stallion83, is the current leader with a gamerscore of 769,520. He's being chased by Stephen Rowe, who goes by Smrnov on Xbox Live and currently sits at 757,774.

Just how dedicated are these guys? "I recently played Inversion. It has this multilayer achievement called “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now,” where you gotta do all of the multiplayer [challenges] – kind of like Gears of War, where you have to get all of the rewards and medals," Cox says. "That achievement took like 560 hours. I still don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to get that one done for some reason."

"For me, it’s about finishing games," Rowe says. "1,000,000 isn’t the endgame. As long as I am having fun doing it, and like the way I’m doing, I’m going to keep at it."

One of Rowe's preferred methods to raising his gamerscore comes in the form of tournaments. "There are a couple of [scoring tournaments]. Some people run them through trueacheivements.com. A lot of these guys run them for the sake of friendly competition, and things like that. Prizes are all out of pocket for them. They aren’t usually sponsored events. There was one last year that ran the full length of the year. They ended up having over 50 teams in it, and weekly elimination for the lowest scoring team. I actually ended up winning that one. You basically have to score every week. As it gets toward the end, and there are fewer teams, the competition ramps up in terms of how many points you have to get because everyone is fighting for the prize positions at that point."

Both Rowe and Cox hope to end the year at around 800,000 gamescore. The competition between the two will obviously intensify as they inch closer to 1,000,000.

"I think I’m going to be the first person to 1,000,000. I really do," says Cox. "A lot of people think what I’m doing is easy to do. There’s a reason not many people are where I’m at. Smrnov is the closest one. He’s the only competition. Everybody else is way too far behind to even catch up."

What do these guys do for a living? Surely they can't have that many points whilst holding down a job/family as well. I would have thought the highest gamerscores would be on accounts which are shared by multiple people.

[eddie tubs]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

What do these guys do for a living? Surely they can't have that many points whilst holding down a job/family as well. I would have thought the highest gamerscores would be on accounts which are shared by multiple people.

Asked myself the same question,but its all true i knew about the first guy and his score and seen a few youtube videos,but didnt know about second guy,which makes it even better cause i likes a good race

Stallion is some kind of reviewer for true achievements I think.

[IRELAND NO 1]

I think everybody knew about Stallion, what I can't understand is where did this guy Rowe come from? I remember at one stage nobody was within 150k of stallion, everybody is always trying to catch these guys out with checking achievements etc.

I personally think that it is unrealistic for any 1 person to get that many achievements consistantly day after day! Everybody has heard the rumours that certain profiles are shared on the same console by multiple users, is this possible yes is this happening with any of these guys who knows. All I can say it is very easy for many gamers to use the same profile on the same console in shifts, they can keep popping achievements all day & night long!

I can imagine how many hours per day it would take, more than than a full time job when do you sleep, what about family, work commitments you can't game for free so you need a job! Stallion does get alot of free stuff that would save him some cash, would that mean it cost him nothing NO...

I got it.
He does what my mother does and lives off the family money. Only difference his family has money.

[IRELAND NO 1]

The weird thing is I seen a few of Stallions video blogs, believe it or not he has a nice girlfriend that he lives with lol. How does she put up with that, yeah she is a gamer but eventually the broody feeling will arrive probably when he is on 950k gaming and babies/toddlers don't mix!

[FPS GLIMMER]

Originally Posted by IRELAND NO 1

The weird thing is I seen a few of Stallions video blogs, believe it or not he has a nice girlfriend that he lives with lol. How does she put up with that, yeah she is a gamer but eventually the broody feeling will arrive probably when he is on 950k gaming and babies/toddlers don't mix!

My wife endures through my video game addiction. It was rough at first when she had to compete with halo 2, since i played it ten hours a day.

[XxB3asti3xX]

I got to looking at these two and some of what I came up with just seems unbelievable. Both of them are at roughly 1200 games played. If each game were to average 10 hours of play time that's 12,000 hours played. If they were to play 8 hours per day that is 1500 days or 4.109 years of playing every single day. How can any one person have that much time to dedicate and still manage to keep a job or family or even leave the house. All of that does not even take into account the other things that both of them keep up with such as blogs and pod-cast's. Just looking at some of there completed games I see quite a few that are supposed to take several hundred hours. All of this just seems like too much for one person although I hope I'm wrong and these guys are not giving the rest of us a bad rep as achievement hunters.

[IrishMercenary8]

Another question u have to ask is with scores like these how many more games are out there for these the fellas to play they must of nearly played all of the games for sale for Xbox 360 his girlfriend must b a saint to let him play so much