We’re talking, you literally thought 5 minutes went by and it was 5 hours later and you felt no need to pee, rehydrate, eat, or sleep. But I’d like to make a caveat: not because of competition to match an online competitor. I’d like to hear your choice for world immersion whether it was a text based game ala Zork, or the latest VR experience ala Elite Dangerous, or a strategy game like Civ IV.
I don’t have an answer myself. It’s going to take some time to collate all the experiences I’ve had to come out with just one winner.
It would be a toss-up between my first 6 months of Everquest or World of Warcraft.
Tough question (lots of gaming to consider over the last 35+ years), but MMORPGs have been the genre that meets your criteria/definition of “most engrossing.”
It was much more likely to happen when I was younger (I especially remember the first night I got my first personal computer: I wasn’t 10, and it was 11PM when I looked up at the clock just fiddling around typing BASIC commands).
From that period, I remember Sid Meier’s Pirates!, my first real strategy game of sort and a revelation, and Captain Blood, a weird Frecnh game of space opera and poetry, that wasn’t really good per se, but an incredible piece of atmosphere and world building.
Lately, this not happening much makes it even more staggering when it occurs. The last game to pull me in, that way, has been one that I played for the first time very recently: State of Decay Year One, a game I can’t recommend enough if you didn’t think it would appeal to you because, like me, you like neither open world nor zombie games.
Hard to say. Hard to separate ‘immersion’ or ‘engrossing’ from other qualities. WoW was by far the most addictive game I ever played, but I’m not sure I’d precisely use those words to describe it, though they certainly qualified to some degree.
At a first approximation I’d give it to Ultima III, which had a sort of haunting, almost supernatural quality to my 10 year old self. It was the first universe I really seemed to perceive inside a CRT and nothing else has drawn me quite that strongly. It helped that I was so young, probably.
On the other hand, I also remember crawling through air ducts in Half-Life in 1999 (probably We’ve Got Hostiles) and feeling so intensely engaged that I was practically projecting my consciousness onto the screen.
For me, I’m pretty sure it was a random MUD that I played back in college, in 1992 or so. I remember getting completely lost in it and spending days just living in my imagination. I think it was called Lusty MUD, run from TAMU, but it was not adult themed or anything. I remember being so in awe off the Wizards (Level 18) and hoping I one day would get there. Unlike modern MMOs, when you became a Wizard, you gained the power to start contributing content to the game world – building dungeons, guilds, etc.
In terms of time played then definitely Halflife/Counterstrike during my uni days. Although I didn’t play it for super long stretches, I have to give points for Journey on the PS3 where my jaw was dropped the whole time I played.
When I was a kid it was Civilization I or II, now it’s Paradox GSGs like Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, or Hearts of Iron IV. I can play these games for hours on end without even thinking about it. Most other games, even ones I really enjoy, I need to break from after an hour or two.
Honourable mention goes to the first game I played with a joystick: Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries. Very engrossing.
While people can get abosorbed by a game like Candy Crush, wanted to steer in the opposite direction of that to hit experiences that immersed your mind because of the world, not because some psychologist/marketer came up with a digital cocaine formula.
I must me Tim’s older brother, but Ogame was a mind Fudge for me and still remember getting a bad disk for the original Pirates (nothing on side 2) and having to wait for a replacement. And the number of times I tried to load it…me is sad.
I can pretty much play EU4 all day.
To be fair, WoW was far more immersive than Candy Crush. There was more going on than just psychological hooks. I still get nostalgia hits listening to the music for Dun Morogh or Elwynn. But I don’t think it was as engrossing to my 30 year old self as Ultima III was to my 10 year old self – despite my playing it orders of magnitude more.
This is a tough one. I would say the three biggest candidates would be:
Civilization II. I remember going home for the summer from college, and playing it through the night sometimes. I remember looking up at the time and being floored that several hours had passed.
Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters - The core of this game was the amazing combat system. I had already logged a lot of hours into the first Star Control, but in this one, with so many new ships, and huuuuuge universe to explore, I would just get lost for hours and hours at a time. And in most open world games, the world itself gets smaller and smaller and smaller the more you explore, and the more that feeling that you have so much left to see diminishes over time. But this is one of the rare ones where I never felt that. The map was so huge, there were so many star systems to explore, that I was never ever sure if I saw all the races, if I encountered all the dialogue, if I solved all the mysteries. Even when I played the game multiple times, I was never really sure if there was a way to meet the people who designed those deadly probes somewhere. Or if I could enter the alternate space of the Orz and finally find out for sure what happened to the Orz. Or if there was somewhere on the map where I would find some hidden corner where there was another race that I completely missed.
Mass Effect series - I came to this late compared to a lot of Qt3, but once I was in, I didn’t want to leave this universe. I went in for hours and hours at a time in the first Mass Effect, and that would have been great. But those that have played it know what happens late in the game. You discover a new enemy, and the climatic battle is such a spectacular ending. Mass Effect 2 was a disappointment in comparison, but still very engrossing. And then Mass Effect 3 for 99% of the game was everything I dreamed it would be. An amazing experience all around. I only wish I hadn’t timed it so that I would be starting ME3 soon after release. If only I could have played ME3 after the improved ending was released.
If I had to pick a winner, I’d probably pick Civilization II. It’s the only one out of these three that made me completely lose all sense of time.
EDIT: Oh shit, I forgot Privateer and Independence War, both engrossed me for sooooooo long. I think Civ II still wins, but Privateer would be very close.
Elite
Alternate Reality
Mercenary - Escape from Targ
Master of Orion
Silent Service
Crusade in the Desert
Rally Speedway (adventure international)
Breach
Back-in-the-day Everquest, for sure. I averaged something north of five hours a day in EQ from 1999-2005 or so. I somehow also maintained a social life and completed some fairly rigorous schooling in good standing. Sometimes I really wish that I still had that flexibility to ignore sleep when I felt like it.
In ‘modern’ times for me it would be WoW (or maybe EQ), but this certainly stemmed from an early love of MUDs much like Clay. I still poke around a few of them now and then, likely just for nostalgia reasons.
Since WoW, I’ve yet to ever get all that ‘engrossed’ in any game to the same extent. I’m now mostly broken with some form of video game ADHD.
