For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though. 🙂
Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts… and that’s probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.
Have you played Factorio? Based on what games you posted, I think you’d like it.
I’m at like 650 hours and it still feels fresh, challenging, allows for creative and logical thinking
I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.
I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.
Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.
I can definitely relate to the counter strike stuff. I played faceit and esea for a while and the competitiveness eventually ruined the game for me. Also it was incredibly frustrating to start a regular game just for fun and have an opponent start spinning immediately.
Yeah, and somehow it just gets worse once you’re just scheduling a full calendar of scrims a week in advance and treat it like work that way. The pugs were at least entertaining in some way, but the rest of it was only ever going to be satisfying if it lead somewhere instead of being a clearly misguided wasted effort from the start
Civilization, Civilization 2, Civilization 3 and FreeCiv
Just one more turn. Looks up. Where did the day go?
I finally kicked the habit with FreeCiv.
Quake (any), Dyson Sphere Program, Path of Exile. Those are the big three, many others had smaller but intense addiction phases.
Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.
Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol
Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I’m still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I’ve always wanted) and I’m getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD
RS, i bought prenium for 6 months then i started playing it all the time(right before the pandemic) then bought ingame bonds with ingame money for a couple years, until early last year i stopped doing prenium for members, only play maitenance mode on the account.
Sadly, Fall Guys. Little did I know when I started playing it when it released for free on PSN that it would become my most played game of all time. Having 8 of us to make 2 complete teams with every night was a lot of fun. It was just an easy game to play, but not think while playing and just talk with friends for an hour or 2 a night. Some of the funniest conversations I’ve ever had was during this game. This month marks 5 years of playing this on average 5 times a week. Sadly this year we all finally drifted and I barely played the last few months but maybe once or twice a week and with 1 or 2 others on a good night. 5 years is crazy long for me, so I will be shocked if we find anything else that grabs us like this ever again, but im hoping.
Team Fortress 2 and Splatoon
I have probably over 3k hours on Splatoon. I can’t stop. I’m S+8 fwiw
I always thought Salmon Run looked so fun when my daughter played, but I never gave it a go.
Hitman: Codename 47
My latest addiction was Peripeteia but I beat it in about 40 hours so the high was short lived. I really fuckin loved that game and looking forward to additions as it moves through early access.
Oh cool, most of them are open source and / or free as well, if anyone wants to try them.
really cool games fr
Haha, yeah I have my eyes on Balatro, but have refrained from getting it, because of that.
Original World of Warcraft.
I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.
If my gf (now wife) played we’d probably never get anything done.
I played for maybe 4 years… With my GF.
We’d play together for hours nearly every day.
I would play “a bit” before work and end up an hour late. This happened often and we just quit cold turkey. Ended up MMO hopping for like 12 years. Now we don’t do MMOs.
If we’re talking actual legit addiction, to the point of finding it hard to quit, Skyrim and Pokémon (first four generations). Any other game, no matter how much I love it or how many hours I’ve got, I could put away and not touch for a while. When I first got into Skyrim, I played it nonstop for about 3 or 4 years, hours a day every day. After around 5k hours I finally had a hard drive failure which corrupted a save file and I finally took that as a sign to stop playing. I actually stopped playing video games entirely for a while to make sure I didn’t go back to it. About a year ago I figured I’d reinstall it and play again for a bit, immediately sank 50 hours in and uninstalled it before I fell into that rabbit hole again.
Pokemon is similar, though not as bad. But any time I revisit a Pokemon game I have to go through all the games in the first four gens, get super into it with dozens of tabs on individual Pokemon and stats and such, and then I have to stop myself, otherwise I’d probably do the same thing as Skyrim. As a kid growing up I was properly addicted to that series, and as an adult it still hasn’t gone away.
There’s lots of other games I’ve had tons and tons of hours into, but I could hang them up and move on. Skyrim especially but Pokemon too are actual addictions for me.
RS3 was my go-to, started up on a halloween event prior to pandemic, then decided to test a 6month prenium membership, and then the pandemic hit, and people are staying home anyways, so farmed enough ingame currency to buy yearly membership up until last year, when the bonds jumped in price(in game and irl money) immediately stopped at that point. i was already looking for excuse to quit before, but couldnt stop myself from playing though. although i still have itch to play, i only do it as a matainenace mode now, rather than spend hours and hours playing everyday.
Space Engineers right now. The Scrapyard scenario really gets me.
