I played Minesweeper almost every day during the summer in the 90's. I got so good at it that I eventually whittled down my time to a mere 17 seconds on the largest puzzle (expert). At that point I figured I couldn't get any faster, and moved on to a new game. Years later, I was looking at the Guiness Book of World Records and noticed that the record for the expert minesweeper is something like 25 seconds.
Of course, I'd have to dig up my old computer from a landfill to try and prove it, so I just have to live out the rest of my days knowing that I'm an unrecognized world record holder.
Funny story. When my friend started playing minesweeper, I would go to his computer and clear out all of his scores by editing in my scores as "beating" him.
Being super competitive, in order not to lose to me, he became a fiend at minesweeper, being able to do solve the beginner series in under 20 seconds. As he would get better and better, I would continue to beat his high score until he had the beginner down to somewhere around 7 seconds.
I changed it to 6 seconds.
He beat it to 5 seconds.
I changed it to 4 seconds.
At that point he was like, WHAT IS GOING ON? And then I showed him how I could just edit the scores. Boy was he dissapointed. But it goes to show how far we can push ourselves if we know that it's "possible."
Related: My mom really likes the old Windows version of FreeCell. For years, every time she moved computers, I've had to copy the Windows registry values where the score table is kept in order to get her to "accept" the new computer.
The current record [1] is in fact 26.59 seconds for expert. This doesn't make you an unofficial world record holder because, among other reasons, the chance is that you have encountered an easy enough board by chance. The most popular measure of board difficulty is 3BV, defined as the minimum number of left clicks to solve that particular board, and should be at least 100 for the expert record to be recognized. This makes the current record extremely impressive---someone somehow clicked 4+ times second and correctly solved the whole table!
Nice one! I bet lots of world records are casually beat like that - the overlap between “nerdy enough to get insanely good at, say, a puzzle video game” and “extroverted/arrogant enough to draw global attention to the accomplishment” seems pretty small.
Of course, I'd have to dig up my old computer from a landfill to try and prove it, so I just have to live out the rest of my days knowing that I'm an unrecognized world record holder.