Probably my second choice. Grabbed me in a way the WC games never did.
Not a true candidate for “engrossing,” but who didn’t dream about Tetris after playing it for the first time?
I’d like to say Starflight, as that was definitely a formative game for me. And I dropped so many hours into the various Infocom games that it’s hard to deny them, but for most engrossing I probably need to go back to Magic Candle, for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere - and since I am repeating with this one, I’ll just link to my explanation.
Either that or Ultima V. I freely admit that IV is the better game, but it didn’t grab me the same way as V. I needed to get revenge on Blackthorne and free the country in a way that I didn’t need to become the Avatar. Anyway, with Ultima V and Magic Candle both I filled notebooks with scrawlings about rune translations, reagent lists and locations, magic spells and what they could do, and many many maps. I am not sure I’m even capable of being engrossed these days the way I was then.
An impossible pick among X-COM, MajorMUD, Dragon Warrior, Doom, Final Fantasy, ADOM, Quake, or Company of Heroes. None of them were significantly more engrossing than the others.
System Shock ONE…that game was so far ahead of its time, its not even funny
World of Warcraft mmo…my first mmo…playing with other people was a mind blowing experience for the first time,I also worked with a guy who was in the game and we played together…that didn’t hurt either
Imperialism ONE…stayed up late many a night knowing I had to go to work the next day
all the ‘city building games’ of yesterday…‘caesar, pharoh, emperor’…just great games though once you saw it as a ‘puzzle’ game, it lost its charm for replayability
The first videogame that ever completely stole my life was Master of Magic. Good Lord, I could not get enough of that game at the time.
For me, It’s Shogun 2 Total War. A masterpiece of epic battle strategy/simulator. You could spend hours to conquer Japan with large-scale armies or take a look of two units clashing each other with real fights.
Also, there’s Earth Defense Force 4.1 on PC. 80+ missions filled with bugs (literally) and playable in co-op.
Magic: The Gathering (the 1997 video game) - I completely lost track of time when I first sat down to play this game. When my wife tapped me on the shoulder, it was 15 minutes until I was supposed to be waking up the next morning to go to work. I went to work and was so exhausted that I had to come home early. I almost fell asleep on the 20 minute drive home.
Need For Speed II SE - A friend of mine and I played this split screen for so long one day that when we finally stopped playing and got up, we both had vertigo. I’ve never before or since had that happen from playing a video game.
Oooh, that game is a part of my childhood (and gamers in my country)
I can’t say with any certainty which game was the most engrossing I have ever played, so I will list in chronological order the names of some of the games I remember spending a great deal of time playing:
Pool of Radiance, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, Master of Magic, EverQuest, World of Warcraft.
I am omitting many more games I spent many hours playing, particularly war games by SSI, SSG, MicroProse and others. But I believe the games named in the first paragraph of this post should suffice.
For me it also has to be Everquest. The first night I played, even through server errors, it was a revelation. And no other game would I have tolerated 16 hour raid days for fat loot, or staying up til 3 AM to get your corpse back from the belly of a dragon.
Dwarf Fortress
Myst.
Everquest kept me up for days. It was my first real taste of a world where you connect with others. I’d played Neverwinter Nights before that but this was a different level.
After some consideration I have to say Red Storm Rising on the C-128. I spent countless hours playing that game. To the point of wearing the printing off of the keyboard overlay. They even had a contest for the highest final score where you sent in a save game disk. So there goes another crapload of hours. I ended up 133 out of who knows how many hundreds of entries. I often consider breaking out the old system to play again, but the floppies have no doubt degraded by now.
A close second is Baldur’s Gate 2 with the expansion on the PC.
When I was 14 I picked up a copy of PCGamer. I was pretty much completely new to games. On the cover of the magazine, they had a cd with game demos. I remember 3 of those demos:
Age of Wonders
Thief
Pharaoh
I ended up buying all those games and playing them to death.
Age of Wonders especially had an effect of me because I was, to put it mildly, a bit of a LOTR geek, so here was this brand new (to me, I realise other worlds had explored the concepts before) world with Orcs, Haflings, Elves, Goblins - I remember the demo map, played it inside and out with all 4 factions, was addicted.
Later, I came across Starcraft, and played that quite a bit, even multiplayer with people from school. That was awesome, winning or losing, then talking about it in school the next day.
Then from Starcraft I went to Warcraft 3…and bounced off it so thoroughly it wasn’t even funny. Disliked everything bar the cinematics.
Now, recently, games have largely lost their power to thoroughly engross me, because I’ve played so many that whenever I play one I keep thinking how it would be better if x…
Exceptions are Total Warhammer (despite seemingly everyone assuring me it is a much shallower game…I am having fun. It’s not perfect by any means) and Crusader Kings in the last 2 years…and Dominions 4.
For me, it was the “new” version of Sid Meier’s Pirates. I bought it on day 1, a Tuesday, but hadn’t installed it yet. It was now Friday night, and because I have no life, I thought to myself: “it’s 7:00 PM on Friday night. Might as well install the new game and see what it’s all about”. So, I installed the game and played around a bit. Thought it was pretty cool (I’d never played the original). Then I decided, well, it’s probably about 9:00 now. Time to get something to eat, watch a little TV and hit the sack.
Exited the game and the first thing I notice is the clock on my computer now says 3:24 AM. “Great”, I said “Game has a memory leak or glitch that horked up my computer clock”. Well, deal with it tomorrow. Got out of my chair for the first time since sitting down to install at 7:00, and went upstairs only to discover there was no glitch or memory leak. It really was 3:30 in the morning.
8 1/2 hours of not moving, not getting up, no food, no drink, no bathroom breaks.
So, yea, color me engrossed.
Tony
I’m having a hard time choosing for myself. I can recall one specific example - Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. I got the game, and booted it up, playing through a couple missions. I was in college at the time, and good buddies with my neighbor across the hall. He sidled in, saw me playing, and I showed him the game for a bit. It wasn’t an easy game, and it provided a lot of options - loadout, deployment area, tactics during a mission, etc.
This was in the morning.
Early the next morning, we emerged, victorious, having beaten the game in a single long stretch. We’d traded off, and had sat planning missions whenever we suffered a setback. There was a lot going on in that game that made for some great tactics - gravity affecting weapon arcs and movement, real time weather that affected the game and AI, etc. I remember one mission where we figured out that the low gravity of the planet we were on allowed us to arc mortar shots about halfway across the map, so we ended up just setting up a picket line with our AI squadmates and winning the mission by lobbing mortars at our targets from the high point of the map. I don’t think we saw any combat that mission. It was awesome.
I can also answer for my wife. ESIV: Oblivion. She’s adored Morrowind; it had been her first real RPG. Oblivion came out, and while she griped about how stripped down it was compared to the prior title, she became enamored with the world. The relative ease of the systems (compared to Morrowind, which had a terrible UI for … well, anything) also lead to huge time sinks. She would boot up the game, fully intending to actually do quests. Five hours later, she would realize that she had simply done inventory management, soul gem management, and some enchanting. The next night, she’d load it up, intent on doing that one quest in her backlog. Again, hours later she would realize she had headed in the right direction, but “ooh shiny” had drawn her from one thing to the next, and now she had accumulated like five more quests.
Someone should make this into a meme!
MOO and the original X-com.
I’m in my mid-40’s, so the answer to this question is different for each different era in my gaming lifetime.
As a teen in the mid-late 80’s it was definitely the 8-bit computer RPGs. Starting with Temple of Apshai, through the first four Ultimas and culminating with Alternate Reality City and Dungeon, into which I sank countless enraptured hours.
In college I broke away from computer gaming, partly due to budget constraints but mostly because I was working my ass off at two jobs every moment I wasn’t in school. Since one of those jobs was at a nightclub, there was also a lot of social time spent those years making up for the lack of such in the previous years spent playing 8-bit RPGs! ;-) Near the tail end of college I did buy an NES system, and sank considerable time into Legend of Zelda and Dragon Warrior, but it was nothing like my high school days.
After college I got an IT job, and with it a PC, and I was right back into computer gaming. I spent a lot of time catching up on the SSI Gold Box Series (and silver and black box games as well). Then in the mid-late 90’s I got hooked first on Elder Scrolls : Daggerfall and then on Everquest. I would say from the summer of 1999 through winter of 2001 I was almost exclusively playing Everquest, with short breaks to delve into Asheron’s Call and the occasional single-player PC game here and there. Post Everquest I sank a considerable amount of time for a few years into other MMORPGS/MMOS like Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Asheron’s Call 2 and Planetside.
In my mid 30’s I started finding I had less and less time for online games. Single player RPGs like Morrowind and Oblivion became my obsessions, and while I still managed to find time to sink deeply into both Lord of the Rings Online and (more recently) Planetside 2, my taste for online games has tapered off considerably. I did enjoy a nice long run with Guild Wars though, thanks in large part to making a pact to play with two friends every Thursday, and together we played our way through every mission in the base game and all 3 expansions. That was a blast, and felt far more like a co-op game than an MMORPG. Sadly Guild Wars 2 never grabbed me the same way, and I abandoned it after only a couple of months.
It was during that time period that I discovered the Creative Assembly’s Total War Series. Rome : Total War became a nightly obsession, and nearly every game in the series since has had a similar effect. In the past decade or so it’s been that series, and games like them, that seem to keep me playing far longer than most others. Of course RPGs still hold my attention as well, with Skyrim being the #1 culprit in time wasted. Mount & Blade Warband has also seen hundreds of my hours poured into it.
I guess the main theme over my 30+ years of gaming is that the games I enjoy the most seem to be high quality games with a historical or fantasy theme to them. While I did spend an insane amount of very enjoyable time with the occasional FPS like Half-Life, it seems to be RPG and Strategy games that really sing the siren’s call to me even though it’s 1:00AM and I have to work the next day. I don’t do that nearly as often as I used to, but it still can happen on rare occasions. Like many gamers my age, my backlog is far larger than I could ever find time to play unless I win the lottery and quit my job. I suppose it’s an investment for my retirement, I certainly won’t be bored with 50+ years (by that point) worth of games to choose from.