Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: microsoft, Microsoft Studios, Rare, sea of thieves

Xbox is Trying to Break the Human Cannonball Guinness World Record for Sea of Thieves

Marketing gimmicks occasionally go brilliantly awry, and the latest Microsoft stunt to hype people up for Sea of Thieves just might be the right kind of insane. As part of their launch celebrations for the pirate RPG, Microsoft is trying to break the Guinness World Record for the Greatest Distance Traveled as a Human Cannonball.

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST, David "The Bullet" Smith will attempt to break the record by rocketing out of the Xbox Pirate blaster, and you can watch it live on the Mixer Xbox Channel. The Pirate blaster is a 12,000 lb, 34-foot-long cannon that will shoot Smith from 0 to 60 in one-fifth of a second, with a force of more than 10 Gs. That takeoff is four times faster than an NHRA Top Fuel Dragster, which has a 0 to 60 time of .8 seconds and only hits above 5.6 Gs. And Smith won't have any kind of special aerodynamic engineering to back him up. Smith's goal is travel 200 feet before landing with a 12 G impact on the "landing airbag."

Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why Microsoft is making the Human Cannonball their marketing stunt of choice. After all, cannons are pretty important pieces of that pirate life. It remains to be seen if the stunt will be at all worth it, or if this is just going to be another case of video game marketing gone wrong.

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