PS4 Trophy Whore: Crazy Things We've Done For PlayStation Trophies

Addiction can have a crazy effect on people. When most think of addiction, they often think of things with negative outcomes such as drugs or alcohol, but try to picture habits and routines that you just can’t break. Are you the type to have a coffee every morning? What about that mobile game that you don’t tell anyone about, but you still log into and play every single day? Compulsively go for trophies in all of your PlayStation games, even if the game isn’t all that great? Perhaps a less abrasive word might be habit, seeing as having a trophy habit makes you sound much more in control than a trophy addiction, which might make you come across as some crazed video game playing lunatic fiending for the next ding.

Long story short, I have this “habit” of going for trophies, even the insane ones that not only require me to pull off crazy things in games, but to alter or do something in my real life in order to achieve them, and I know I’m not alone in this. We’ve been asking for your submissions and we’ve talked to the rest of the PlayStation LifeStyle staff to bring your real stories of crazy real life things people have done for trophies.

In one of my favorite games, Destiny, one trophy aptly named Flawless Raider requires you to complete a raid flawlessly. This means that no one in the fireteam can die for the full duration of the raid. While this was made easier as the level cap increased and cheeses were found for the raids, getting together a six man group of skilled enough players was a tough task. If even one person dies, it’s back to orbit to restart the raid. Our attempts at this on the Vault of Glass raid even caused one person to rage quit the game when he missed a jump, and we didn’t see him back online for months. My group finally completed it with five people total on Crota’s End without a single one of us succumbing to the darkness. Of course, many people since have shown their talents by completing the raid flawlessly solo, so maybe it wasn’t all that difficult after all, but for a trophy where one screw up can mean hours of lost time? It’s still a tough sell.

Daily Grind

In Rayman Legends, the Truly Awesome! trophy requires players to reach the final level of awesomeness. To accomplish this monumental task, you need to complete medals in online challenges with increasing point values awarded for each medal value. First, this means that you are in competition with other players to stay in the higher medal brackets each day/week. Second, this means that skill is required, but online challenge farmers are pushing down the average medal by taking all of the top spots. On average, this trophy takes about three to six straight months of completing daily challenges if you are getting silvers most of the time, so I made it a daily chore.

Every day I would work about 20 minutes of Rayman Legends into my day to complete the daily challenges, slowly chipping away at that awesomeness level until I finally got it to pop up nine months after I first started the game (and probably about four months of doing the challenges almost every single day). Some days I did better, some days I did worse, but I always made sure to play them.

Twisted Metal for PS3 had a similar trophy called All Sales Are Final, where you had to win an online match every day for 30 days straight. Miss one day, and it’s back to the beginning. I never ended up getting the Platinum on Twisted Metal, but to this day that trophy is still the rarest out of the 12,104 trophies I have.

Reader Stories

Chris (PSN: RemingtonInk) had a bunch of stories for us because he’s a crazy trophy addicted madman, so let’s run through the things he’s done for trophies. Mortal Kombat (2011)’s My Kung Fu is Stronger required 24 hours of playtime with every character. All 29 of them. Yeah. That’s 30 days of Mortal Kombat playtime. It’s possible to build two characters at once while leaving your PS3 on in training, which is exactly what Chris did for about 14 straight days to get this trophy.

The rest of his stories come at the expense of his being a completionist. He tortured himself getting the ridiculously tough WipEout HD platinum despite not liking racing games. He bought all of the DLC for Burnout Paradise after getting the game for free just to have a 100% list. And he got the Platinum on Hannah Montana The Movie, which doesn’t need much explanation, because even playing that game is a crazy thing he did in real life.

Enzo regales us with a tale about how he created an electronic LEGO engine that pressed a button repeatedly, along with a complex amount of level up calculations in Excel, having a friend help him reach a 15x multiplier, and leaving his PS4 on for a week or two while he reached level 100 in Injustice. Yup, another fighting game that requires absurd amounts of playtime in order to achieve the Platinum trophies, and if it requires a time commitment, you can bet trophy hunters will find some way to cheese or circumvent it, even if it means they can’t play their own PS4 during this time.

Andy went for a glitched trophy in Color Zen based entirely on a theory that you had to beat all 460 levels without turning it off, so he spent three days doing this and… you guessed it, didn’t end up getting the trophy. This is perhaps the harshest of every story, because while the others end with that beautiful ding, Andy’s ends up being three wasted days that he could have been playing or doing literally anything else.

PSLS Staff Trophy Stories

Finally, the gallery below contains some of the trophy stories from the rest of the PlayStation LifeStyle staff. While they may not all be hardcore trophy hunters, they’ve all felt a bit of that trophy hunting bug.

Do you have any crazy trophy stories of your own? What have you done in real life for a trophy that people may find a bit crazy if they don’t understand trophies? Share your own stories in the comments below.

I want Trophy Theory to be a conversation. This shouldn’t be me talking at you. It should be a discussion about trophies and everything that comes with it. I want your suggestions for what you want to talk about or see on Trophy Theory. Have a question for the Trophy community that you want to discuss? Throw your ideas into the comments below, email me, or tweet me. You may see your suggestion tailored into a future Trophy Theory.

Essential Reading:

Trophy Theory Real Life Crazy Stories

Mack Ashworth - The Last of Us

It's been a while since I cared about achievements/trophies, as when a bug prevented me from getting the "PP Collector" in Dead Rising, my addiction ended.

However, what with how awesome The Last of Us turned out to be, I went ahead and replayed it on the Grounded difficulty mode, grabbing the gold trophy. There's another trophy awarded for completing it on Grounded difficulty a second time, which I plan to do before the release of TLOU2.
Michael Briers - Dead Space 2

Slugging through Dead Space 2 on Hardcore. It's basically the same difficulty level as Normal with the added twist that you can only save three times total, and each time you die you're automatically sent back to your last save point which, in a solo campaign that stretches close to nine hours, is downright infuriating. But I persevered, got the Platinum, and have now seen enough laser eye surgery to last a lifetime.
Stephen Bitto - Watch Dogs

The last trophy I needed for the Watch Dogs platinum was Disk Space Full which requires you to scan all possible music in bars, shops and off people's phones. This is designed to be a easily achieved silver trophy... unless you wait until after the end of the game! After you complete the main quest line, the song randomizing algorithm breaks and three of the songs become extremely difficult if not impossible to find. I spent literally 25 hours scanning thousands of people trying to find these songs without any luck. My girlfriend started looking at me as if I was losing my mind chasing some outlandish conspiracy theory. Even worse, a few of the songs could only be unlocked during the story including the final mission. Eventually, I caved and simply played the 18 hour main story again and made sure to get each song along the way.

Over 40 hours to unlock a trophy I didn't care about in a game I didn't particularly like. Crazy indeed.
Zarmena Khan - Uncharted 4

Craziest thing I've ever done for a trophy? Find every single piece of treasure in Uncharted 4. I didn't even Platinum it. Anyone who knows me know how much I hate wasting time on collecting items. Also, I did a lot of grinding in Mortal Kombat X for a rare trophy. Again, didn't even Platinum it. And I hate grinding with a passion.
Cameron Teague - Final Fantasy XV

I put rubber bands on my joysticks and left the game running to get they survival level 10 trophy in FFXV.