Microsoft honors the player with the most Xbox Live achievement points

On the eve of its next-generation console launch, Microsoft honored the player with the most achievement points for playing Xbox 360 video games.

On Spike TV, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, started the countdown show for the launch of the Xbox One with a segment on Ray Cox, a gamer with more than 950,000 gamerscore achievement points on the Xbox 360.

Cox said his goal in live was to get more than a million gamerscore points. That’s virtually impossible to do, and we shudder at how many hours that might have taken him to do it. Cox had to play on overseas consoles in addition to his U.S. version in order to get close to his goal.

Hryb gave Cox a special edition white Xbox One on the air. He also got a lifetime membership to Xbox Live. Cox was speechless. Hryb said that players had collectively earned 358 million gamerscore points in the past seven years. The average gamerscore is just 8,538. Cox said he has played more than 1,500 games and completed more than 800 of them. One of his favorite achievements is getting more than 10,000 kills in Gears of War multiplayer.

Since gamerscores can be continued from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, Cox can hit one million gamerscore points pretty quickly after the Xbox Live launch. Of course, during the past seven years, Cox probably could have also gotten a doctorate in physics. But to each his own.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.