Berg first broke the world record for World's Tallest House of Freestanding Playing Cards in 1992 at the age of 17, with a tower 14 feet, 6 inches tall (4.67 meters). Since then, Berg has been commissioned to break his own Guinness Record approximately ten times.
He built another tower in the College of Design's atrium at Iowa State University in 1998. It stood at approximately 25 feet (7.62 meters) tall and used over 1500 decks of standard cards weighing over 250 pounds (113.4 kilograms). It took two and a half weeks to build working in shifts from 4 to 12 hours each day. During construction, the tower was surrounded by scaffolding. On November 6, 1999, Berg built a taller tower for the German edition of Guinness Prime Time in the lobby of the casino at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. That tower was approximately 25.29 feet (7.7 meters) tall and required over 1700 decks to stack up to 131 stories.
Berg's most recent tallest record was a 25 foot 9 7/16 inch tall tower built at the African-American Museum at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas. For this record, he tried a new technique involving stacking cards vertically instead of horizontally, which reduced the number of cards needed by nearly half.
On September 18, 2009, on Live with Regis & Kelly, Berg attempted to break the Guinness World Record for tallest free-standing card structure in 60 minutes. As Berg stopped building the structure when time ran out, the cards fell down, costing him his bid for a new world record.
World's Largest House of Cards
In 2004, Guinness created a record category for World's Largest House of Freestanding Playing Cards to recognize a project Berg built for Walt Disney World, a replica of Cinderella's Castle. In 2010, the record was renewed by himself using 4051 sets of cards, over 218,000 cards, and built in 44 days, a replica of the Venetian Macao
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