Huntsville engineer gets 3 world records by supersizing fave childhood games

With more than a million subscribers on YouTube, Michael Pick made the decision to leave his 9-to-5 job at Lockheed Martin and become the “Casual Engineer,” a guy who makes fun videos about building cool things.

Now a full-time YouTube content creator, Pick has 1.25 million subscribers and three Guinness World Records for his oversized versions of his favorite childhood games, including the world’s largest Nerf gun that shoots oversized Nerf darts.

“I grew up reading the Guinness World Record books, and I thought it would be fun to break a record one day,” Pick said. “I had a Nerf gun growing up, and it was a really fun childhood toy. That was a big part of why I chose that record to break.”

Since then, he has received an official Guinness certification for the World’s Largest Xbox X Series. He also built an oversized Nintendo Switch, which has not been certified by Guinness. All of the mega-sized games are functional.

He started in 2021 when he was still working full-time at Lockheed Martin. Using his degree in computer science from Tennessee Tech University, he went to work on his first ultra-cool, ultra-large toy.

“I designed the supersized Nerf gun on my computer using CAD, and then I built it over five months, working just on the weekends, in my garage,” he said.

The gun is 12 feet, 6 inches long and weighs 250 pounds. In addition, it can shoot a dart 250 feet. In fact, Pick’s Guinness record for “fastest motorized foam dart gun fire rate,” which is 2,643 per minute, was set in September 2023.

The Guinness World Record folks wrote: “Michael’s massive Nerf gun has turned a well-known toy into a powerful machine. The giant darts created for his outsized creation can break glass mugs and even break straight into a watermelon!”

Pick shared photos of the Nerf gun but seeing it in person requires a long plane ride. “It’s currently on display at a Guinness World Record museum in Denmark,” he said. “I haven’t visited it yet, but plan to!”

The Xbox Series X stands 6 feet, 8 inches high and is 3 feet, 4 inches wide and 3 feet, 4 inches long. It weighs 250 pounds. Guinness says it is “roughly the size of a standard refrigerator.”

Guinness explained Pick’s process in a 2021 article on its website: “Starting with a wooden exterior, he built supersized replicas of the Xbox’s elements including the back connection ports and other identifying features. According to Michael, the most difficult part of reproducing the giant gaming system was designing the curves atop the Xbox Series X and recreating its glowing logo.”

The Xbox doesn’t work like a standard model but it does function. “By enclosing a comparatively small, regular Xbox Series X in its jumbo counterpart, a signal is sent at the click of a button to an Arduino microcontroller, which cues a motor to press the button on the original, regular-sized console,” Guinness explained. The Xbox took about two days to plan and a month to build.

“I currently have three world records, and I plan to break more,” Pick said.

Find more about Pick and his creations by subscribing to his Michael Pick YouTube channel or check him out on TikTok @casual.engineer or Instagram @casual.engineer.