Ibrahim Al-Nasser, a gaming enthusiast from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has set a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles connected to a single television, with 444 systems hooked up simultaneously.
Al-Nasser's collection spans five decades of gaming history, from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the 2023 PlayStation 5 Slim. It includes mainstream consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, as well as rare items such as the Super A'Can. To manage the complex setup, Al-Nasser employs over 30 RCA switchers and 12 HDMI switchers, along with various converters for older systems. He maintains an Excel spreadsheet detailing the location and activation procedure for each console. "After a while I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn't play," Al-Nasser said. "By adding more switchers, the idea came to my mind to connect all of the gaming consoles I have to the TV then contact Guinness World Records because this project is unique."
Engadget adds:
He's even organized his collection so the cables aren't showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television. That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it's far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.
At 444 consoles there's a real chance he may have some consoles hooked up that have no emulator due to their rarity or some unique, hard-to-reproduce characteristic.
I would not doubt he has quite a few pre-cartridge dedicated machines such as early Pong style consoles (even Nintendo made one, way back when) which can be completely hardware based, sometimes even analog, and thus don't actually have any software to run on an emulator.