When the sun sets over Lungfishopolis, the white glare of CRT and LCD monitors can be seen shining out of every window. Over the years, our people have spent more hours in front of those monitors than some of us have spent sleeping. We look back fondly on those many hours and weeks spent absorbed in a really good game. This week, we drop in uninvited on some of our citizens, and ask them: What games have you put the most hours into?
Oblivion happened to be the perfect storm of accessibility both in terms of game design and title availability for the 360, a platform which, at the time, had no good RPG’s at all. I had played Morrowind for a few hours before I got so incredibly bored with running all over the place and not understanding what the hell was going on that I stopped playing it. At the time that Oblivion came out, not only did I know what I was doing, and know how to do it, but there was nothing else out on the 360. Nada. Zip. Zero. As a result, I threw myself into Oblivion with unparalleled gusto. I was over 100 hours into it when I finally stopped. Then, months later, I picked it back up again deep in the thrall of achievement fever so that I could do all of the Fighter’s Guild quests and finish all of the achievements for the Shivering Isles expansion pack. That last bit of gaming had less to do with the joy of playing Oblivion and more to do with the fact that I could get “easy” points out of my experiences. In fact, going back to Oblivion after so much time away made it abundantly clear that of those 100+ hours playing the game, roughly 80 of them were spent watching the loading screen. Oh snap!
Oblivion. Brandon, my friend, I’ve got you beat. Or perhaps you have me beat, since you wasted less of your life on the game. It’s a sad fact that Oblivion taunts you by keeping count of the hours you’ve squandered in playing and reminding you every time you load up a game. I spent somewhere around 200 hours with my first character, and probably close to half that much time with my second character when I replayed the game. Even without the incentive of achievements, I completed every quest in the game except the Dark Brotherhood and a couple of the Daedric quests, and since I was playing on the PC, I downloaded and installed countless game mods, many of which improved the game more than I’d thought possible. And the loading screens went much faster than on the 360. Nooch.
When it comes to timesinks, and boy this one hurts, the game I have by far spent the most time playing has been World of Warcraft. Before I drop the time-played bomb, I’ll give a little history of my experience with this game. I began playing WoW during its first open beta back in 2004. On launch day, I was logged in and leveling. Things started off innocently enough; at heart I’m an anti-social gamer and was perfectly happy playing human warlock through solo quests and the occasional dungeon crawl with strangers. But then one day something strange happened. I ran the Deadmines with a group of genuinely fun people and ended up being drafted into their guild. To make a long story short, eventually I became the leader of this guild and was responsible for coordinating the activities of a guild with 200+ members. Between leveling, grouping, raiding, grinding, guild administration and resource hoarding alt characters, I was playing close to 40 hours a week. Nearly two years later, after leading my guild to the doorstep of C’thun, real life caught up with me and I decided to leave the game. When my account expired I had accumulated over 134 days – yes, days – played between my four characters for a grand total of nearly 3,216 hours. Yes, it’s a ridiculous total. Yes, my wife was beginning to hate me. And yes, I was hopelessly addicted to this game, but hot damn it was fun while it lasted. My best gaming memories will be of WoW and the friends I made there. However, I believe I will be required to sign a prenuptial agreement if I go within ten feet of another MMO.
Back in 1982, I was given a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600. It was essentially a text based adventure with poor graphics instead of text. Even by Atari 2600 standards the graphics were poor and you could debate for hours as to what an object really was. Was it a sheik or a tall hat? Is that a parachute or a birthday gift? The physics also made little sense. On the first screen there was a rock you could walk through right to left, but it blocked you if you tried it left to right. If you walked south two screens, south suddenly became down and you fell to your death. Calling this game “Abstract” is an understatement and a better game title would have been “Psychotic Break.” It’s because of this if something new happened in the game, I would sometimes have to spend hours trying to figure out the cause. Even with all of these flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I even managed to find the ark costing me only a small portion of my sanity.
In high school, I had a Commodore 64 and I spent way too much time with it. But I don’t think I spent as much time with any game as I did with Ultima V. I’d played all the previous Ultima games, but Ultima V was the one I got really into. In the days before online walkthroughs, this enormous game took even longer to play. I’m willing to bet I spent at least twice as much time with Ultima V as I did with Oblivion. Maybe three times as much. I was in high school, and I had a lot of time on my hands during the summer. Beating this game feels like an achievement even today.
When I sat down and considered the games I had spent the most time with, this one actually surprised me a bit. On the surface, Gran Turismo III: A-Spec doesn’t sound like the kind of game you’d end up playing for huge amounts of time. It’s a racing simulation, not an RPG, and really lends itself to 15-20 minute play sessions. However it turns out that this game is an RPG, except instead of leveling up magical abilities you level up your horsepower. You don’t upgrade your armor; you upgrade your exhaust system. And you don’t improve your skill at blacksmithing; you improve your lap times to within a hundredth of a second. Looking back at my old save file, I had just over 83 hours of playtime on GT3. And being the masochistic gamer that I am, I completed all but one of the Endurance races. Yes, those single event, 1-2 hour long races that you will forsake the bathroom for just to shave another .03 seconds off your lap time. Luckily I was still single when this game came out, I can’t imagine how much track position I could have lost during an ill-timed diaper change.
Resident Evil 2 wasn’t a short game, but the reason it’s on this list doesn’t have as much to do with the game’s length as it has to do with its replayability. Resident Evil 2 for the Playstation shipped with two discs, one for each character. When you finished the game with the first character, you could play through the second mission with the second character. It was assumed that both missions were taking place simultaneously, so things that you’d done as the first character during your first playthrough affected things during the second mission. And while at its core the “second mission” was in many ways the same as the first, there were enough changes to keep you on your toes. In fact, the additional events that happen only during the second mission were what brought the game from just plain good to absolutely amazing. Not only did I play through both missions as Leon and then Claire, I then went back and replayed as Claire and then Leon. After that, I played through the entire second mission again, picking out all the secrets and additional costumes. Then I played the heck out of the “4th Survivor” game I’d unlocked, and actually managed to get through it. Once. That game was HARD. Then, just about two years ago, I went back and replayed the whole second mission again.
I have no idea how much time I spent playing Doom. I was a senior in college and doing my student teaching for the semester which meant that I had a lot of free time on my hands. At the time, I was living in my fraternity house and one of the rules of living there was that you had to have your class schedule posted on your door so that people could find you in the event of an emergency. Shortly after the semester started, I went to my room to find that someone had written “DOOM” in every block of free time on my schedule. Again, I have no idea how much time I spent playing DOOM, but apparently it was quite a lot.
There used to be “Computer Fairs” where Ma & Pa business owners used to sell PC hardware and software. For all I know, they still exist but I can’t think of a good reason why anyone would want to go to one today. I was at one of these shows back in ’92 and saw Wolfenstein 3D for the first time. At first, I thought it was a graphics demo along the same lines as ‘The Bouncing Ball’ and not anything that was really playable. Not only did I find out this game was playable, they were giving it away for FREE minus the “cost” of the disks. I was in total disbelief, “How does this game even exist? How can this game be free?” Keep in mind that the only games with mazes most people knew about were turn based adventure games that only refreshed the screen once per move. This game was refreshing the screen constantly and everything was happening in real time. What I was seeing was something entirely new and became the framework upon which almost all future “First Person Shooters” were based. I must have spent hours playing the game searching for all the secret doors so I could clear the level having found everything.
Neverwinter Nights wasn’t the longest game, but again, that’s not why I ended up spending so much time on it. What I spent the real time with was the Aurora toolset, in which you could create your own adventures. I got into that thing hardcore. During 2002 and 2003, I spent hours on the toolset nearly every night, and got to learn the C-like programming language so well that I began answering coding questions on the Bioware forums. My game was called Farkendry, and the forum topic detailing its development is still up, and can be seen here. I’ve even still got the players’ guide, DM guide, and hakpak, which for some reason I never deleted. They can be found here. The really sad thing is that as far as I’m aware, the only people who ever played it were my friend Mark from Connecticut and my friend Jennifer from New York – people I’d handed a burned CD to – the version I uploaded somehow got corrupted. I still have the thing on a CD at home – maybe I’ll install it again sometime.
Jeanne d’Arc probably gets my award for Most Played Game in Five Minute Increments. I loved this little tactical RPG for the PSP. It featured a great story, excellent graphics, gorgeous animated cutscenes and a large cast of characters to choose from. However, the best feature in the game was the Quicksave option. Most handheld games have this now, where you can save your current progress and it is deleted when you load it up, allowing you to continue through the game without losing your place. I spent the majority of my time playing Jeanne while waiting for my daughter at dance practice. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen a dance studio for children, but fathers are the rarest of species in this setting. Men never evolved an apparatus to communicate with the Dance Mother, so the only thing that saved me from 120 minutes of senseless chatter was the PSP and a pair of earbuds. I’d typically get about ten minutes of focused gaming in before being interrupted by screaming toddlers, chatty mothers or wardrobe changes. By the time I completed Jeanne d’Arc, I had put just under 65 hours into the game and ushered my daughter through six months of dance practice. I still need to go back through and play the new levels that were unlocked by completing the game, but I’m saving that for next dance season. God knows I’ll need it.
I don’t know exactly how many hours I spent playing Puzzle Quest, but I do know that it had to be a lot because I distinctly remember playing it all the time. I played it at work. I played it at home before dinner. I played it after dinner. I played it while watching tv. I even took the damn thing to bed with me and played it well into the night when I should have been sleeping. Not before, and not since has a game so utterly ensnared me in its grasp. I did quests, forged items, trained mounts, captured creatures, seized castles and crafted spells and loved every single minute of it. Once I had finished the main story line, I sold the game and then, recently, bought it again. This time, I haven’t played it nearly as much and it hasn’t held me nearly as tightly. Like the passionate summertime romance that engulfs a couple in the fiery heat of obsession, once reunited after time apart, Puzzle Quest and I just don’t have the same spark as before but I’ll always remember those heady days of summer, when we were inseparable, and the air carried the faint scent of orc blood.
