March 18, 2013
Kacey Musgrave - Merry Go Round
Four times over the previous two years, Leutz tried to break the all-time Q*bert high score of 33,273,520, a record set three decades earlier by a Canadian named Rob Gerhardt, who, oddly enough, can't even remember doing it. Four times, Leutz failed. He was derailed by a lack of sleep, by a lapse in basic motor skills, by all the things that you might imagine would interrupt a three-day marathon of anything at all, let alone a task that requires a deep reserve of hand-eye coordination. He was also stymied by at least one hazard he could not have foreseen: After 36 hours of gameplay in one go-round, his friend Ed, the guy everybody calls Ed the Human Kill Screen, tried to be helpful by unplugging a noisy machine nearby, and in so doing accidentally bumped the Q*bert plug out of its socket.
Those failed attempts left Leutz numb and frustrated, but he found he could not stop himself from trying again. And so on Valentine's Day, at 11:52 in the morning, he sat down on a stool at the Q*bert machine at a suburban New Jersey arcade owned by a punk-rock musician who goes by the name of Richie Knucklez. This time, Leutz had researched sleep patterns on the Internet, studying something called the Uberman schedule (during past marathons, when he rested on an air mattress in the center of the arcade, Richie Knucklez stood over him and watched his rapid-eye movement to measure the quality of his sleep). He did not pull back on his diet or fast leading up to it, as he had done in the past, for voiding-related reasons. When he got hungry in the evening, he ate a roast beef sandwich, and he used no caffeinated stimulants other than tea from the deli next door. He played for 16 straight hours, building up 600 additional Q*berts, and then he ducked under aRoller Disco pinball machine, set his iPhone alarm for 30 minutes in the future, laid his nest of hair on a pillow, and took a nap.
Today's Photo:
It took a few passes with the scissors and two different razors to finally tame the beast.
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