Game of Thrones' final season premiere sets unique Guinness World Record

Game of Thrones is perhaps all anyone wants to talk about (besides Endgame) the week after it shocked its fanbase with the outcome of the Battle of Winterfell. But one record the HBO juggernaut set this year came weeks before the climactic showdown.

In fact, the very premiere of Game of Thrones’ final season set a Guinness World Record — not for tweets, like “The Long Night”, but for demand. According to Deadline, TV analytics company Parrot Analytics teamed up with Guinness World Records in order to — somehow — represent “global demand” in a verifiably record-setting sense.

To do that, the company looked at “global, real-time, and platform-agnostic” measurements. In a release, Parrot Analytics wrote that their methodology looks at “video consumption (streaming and downloads), social media engagement (hashtags, liking, sharing) as well as research actions (reading about shows, writing about shows, etc).” Combining all of these — while lending more numerical weight to those that require more effort from an audience member — leads to their determination of “demand.”

Using that information, Guinness World Records declared that Game of Thrones’ 8th season premiere ("Winterfell," on the day of its release) was the highest global premiere demand for TV — ever. That includes past Game of Thrones season premieres as well as other hit genre shows like The Walking Dead.

“Game of Thrones amassed a per capita global audience demand of 25.46 on 14th of April 2019, its season 8 premiere day. Compared to its per capita global demand of 24.74 on the day of its season 7 premiere, the latest and final season has premiered 2.9 percent higher globally. Premiere day demand has been particularly strong in the United States, United Kingdom and France,” said Parrot Analytics Marketing VP Samuel Stadler.

Now Game of Thrones holds the record for “Most in-demand TV premiere” alongside its social media achievements and countless production feats that have so far gone undocumented. Guinness might as well get ready to record a few more achievements when the finale breaks fans’ hearts — and likely all previous records.

Game of Thrones returns with its final season’s fourth episode on May 5.