RARITAN TWP. — “I don’t think I’ll be playing that game again,” says George Leutz, a day after setting a new world record for marathon video-game playing. The game is Q*bert, and the new record is 84 hours, 48 minutes.

Leutz, 38, lives in Manhattan, but he set his record at an arcade in Raritan Township, near Flemington. The proprietor, who calls himself Richie Knucklez, says that the Guinness rules were scrupulously followed and this feat will get into the record book.

Leutz walks dogs on the Upper West Side by day and plays guitar and sings by night in a Rock 'n' Roll bar band named Crowds and Power.

This was his fifth attempt at setting a world record for playing a video game on one credit. In most previous attempts fatigue overtook him, but one time someone accidentally unplugged the game. Knucklez says a reference to this debacle was made in the Disney Pixar movie “Wreck It Ralph.”

Leutz said his world record attempts were made “mostly to impress my friends,” whom he called video-game standouts. “Richie holds a world record for high score in Space Invaders, and one of my friends is a Donkey Kong record holder. I’m friends will all these guys who have all these great scores, so I wanted to have a score that would impress them too, so I decided I’d better pick a game and do really well at it.”

What does he say to those who scorn his achievement? “The game is secondary,” he said “Whether you are climbing a mountain or swimming the English Channel, it’s about pushing the limits of human potential, even though it’s just a video game…” He said with a laugh, “Yes, it’s a frivolous thing, but what kind of world do we live in that a man can’t do something to impress his friends? You do it because you can, and you try because you can.”

Leutz’s virtuoso performance on Q*bert, a game that was big in the early ‘80s, beat the existing record of 68.5 hours established by Ed Heemskerk of Florida in 2012. Leutz’s bid for immortality ran from Feb. 14 into the 18th. Heemskerk also played Q*bert, but his game ended when he ran out of “lives.”

Guinness World Record rules say you earn five minutes of rest for every hour of effort, according to Leutz. But you can’t pause the game; you have to accumulate enough lives so your game doesn’t end while you are napping.

He says the trick was to pace himself properly. Losing strategies tried earlier included taking a break every 12 hours, and playing for 36 hours straight.

His winning schedule was nine hours of gaming, then 45 minutes of deep sleep. Although Knucklez’s arcade has 50 games, Leutz chose Q*bert because it can be done one-handed. “It’s just one control, no buttons, so at break time I didn’t have to spend any time eating. Also it happens to be the game that I’m good at from when I was a kid.”

Knucklez notes that if you stare at the Q*bert game for awhile, the image tends to reverse like artwork by M.C. Escher, but Leutz managed to play through it.

The one-man marathon marked the grand reopening of Richie Knucklez Arcade Games, which has moved from a strip mall near Croton, where it had been for seven years, to 299 S. Main St. in another strip mall just south of Flemington. The new location is in Raritan Township, as is Knucklez’s residence, where Leutz slept victoriously on the couch for 12 hours.

Knucklez said that producers representing TV stars Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel have already called to talk to Leutz about possible guest appearances on their shows.

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