Image via abc.net

Many of us have had some excessively long gaming sessions, after which we may look back and think "what was I doing?!". They can be fun, though, and there are often teams of people that use gaming marathons to raise money for charity, among other things, taking what is an objectively unhealthy activity and bringing some good from it.

Four students from Warrnambool in south-west Victoria, Australia, decided that they wanted to own a World Record, however. As a result they played Mario Kart games for 35 hours and 46 minutes, earning them the Guinness World Record for "longest video game marathon playing a racing game", beating the previous record of 30 hours.

In terms of the rules that were followed, only one of the four had to be playing at one time, and there was a ten minute break allowed for every hour played. Though the attempt was dreamt up six months ago, it was a month before the marathon that a training session was undertaken, with the the group's Harry Twyford saying the following.

We had a little training session about a month ago. We made it about 10 hours before one of us threw up and the rest of us fell asleep.

So it wasn't much fun.

Twyford was also one of two that played for 15 hours straight, accumulating 150 minutes of break time for a short sleep. Despite raising $500 for charity the group was criticised by some, though Twyford launched a staunch defence of the effort required.

You may be thinking we're a bunch of slackers, bludgers and lazy students, when as a matter of fact this was an incredibly difficult thing to achieve which required assistance from copious amounts of individuals in the community.

Ultimately, the town's Mayor even showed up to see what was happening, and Harry Twyford, James Hickman, Josh Alexander and Matt Smith can now share a Guinness World Record.

Could you beat that?

[source abc.net.au]