I'm not going to include MMO's in this because that would be unfair. Almost anyone that has ever gotten knee deep into an MMO that is the obvious winner. There are people out there that have probably spent YEARS playing WoW and for me when I was in college it was totally common for me to play 8 hours a day of Dark Age of Camelot. This is something I seriously regret to this day and although I did slip up and get addicted to an equally stupid time-sink of an MMO later, I have now permanently written MMO's off my to-do list. I will never play one of those again because the futility of it all and that fact that it never ends is enough reason for me to keep away from those.
So for the sake of simplicity let's just focus on non MMO's because those would be the clear winner in terms of hours spent on it.
There are a lot of games that I have returned to over and over again in my life such as the original Doom, Age of Empires, and Fallout: New Vegas but none of them come even close to a game that I think is one of the most perfect games ever made: Starcraft
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BTW the $5 or so for the remastered version is money well spent
I was first introduced to this game when a high-school friend of mine was visiting me in college. I remember this day vividly because I didn't even have my own computer at the time and he brought his entire setup with him. Also, our power was cut off on the first night he was staying with us due to non-payment of the bill so we ran a huge extension cord to our neighbor's window - eternal thanks to those guys.
Starcraft wasn't totally unlike any game I had ever played because I had already been down the road of Warcraft and Dune II at that point. The difference between Starcraft and the other RTS games I had played up to this point was the fact that it was perfectly balanced and the stages were carefully designed to give you just enough resources to encourage exploration. You may recall that in both Warcraft and Dune II that your ability to continue to get resources in one location was damn-near-unlimited. So if you just wanted to sit in one place and build the hell out of your defenses that was an option. The enemy's AI wasn't very good so it was really easy to build a "choke point" and just wipe them over and over again.
Things changed with Starcraft
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While the above image might not be the best to represent this point since there are a ton of minerals and 2 vespene gas mines at the starting base, for the most part, you had to continually explore and expand before you would run out. This kept you on the move and also necessitated having an assault force with forward mobility. You couldn't just park a new base somewhere and expect it to not get overwhelmed.
Each of the 3 factions, human, Zerg, and Protoss had their own strengths and weaknesses and I can't even imagine the amount of time that must have gone into ensuring that no single side had a distinct advantage over the other. To this day no one has really discovered a certain side that is the "best" and it kind of depends on the skill of the user for any of them to be effective.
The campaign was truly engaging and the replay value was always there once you had played all the way through. I don't know how many times I have completed the entire campaign but it was a LOT. I know that I didn't feel that I had completely 100%'d this game until I totally dominated every stage that had the ability to build bases on it.
There is this one level where where one of your main characters, Kerrigan, is in a base that at the end of the level is meant to be overwhelmed by a zerg onslaught that simply spawns tons of enemies all at once. The idea being that your base would be overrun no matter what you did.
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nothing's getting through that
However, once you understood how the dynamics of the level worked you could actually keep the onslaught at bay indefinitely and the sequence will still count down and have Kerrigan captured even though you are more than capable of keeping the swarm from entering your base. Then, if you flew forward you would discover a magical space on the map that endlessly had enemy troops running out of it endlessly. This was kind of amusing to completely dominate the enemy this way but for any gaming nerd like me, this was always going to be an objective.
As awesome as 1-player mode was, this paled in comparison to the user-created maps in multiplayer that you would never run out of maps on since it was the community itself that built these. You could choose to play against one another or as a team against AI controlled enemies. Some of these maps were damn near impossible although I am sure there are some Koreans out there that figured it out.
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this is so common today but Battle.net was a pioneer of the time because it actually worked
I can still go back to this game and the Brood War expansion to this day and be entertained which is truly remarkable when you consider that it was first released in 1998. What other games can you say have a loyal fan-base nearly a quarter century after it was released?
Also, these days I am not a fan of cutscenes but Starcart's were a welcome surprise back in the late 90's. They were masterfully created and featured fantastic animation and great voice-acting as well. They clearly sunk a lot of time and money into ensuring that this game was absolutely perfect and I consider it to be one of the best games that has ever been made by anyone.
I have not kept track of how many hours I put into this game because while it do have a script you could run to see how many hours you had played, I have had this same game installed on half a dozen machines over the years. I estimate it is multiple hundreds of hours, easily.
I can still go back to this game today and enjoy myself and I don't think that this will ever change. Do we have better graphics / resolution and sound with today's gaming? Well of course we do. None of that, however, can compensate for having made an absolutely perfect game that stands the test of time.
I will go to my grave believing that Starcraft is one of the greatest games ever made. It may actually be the best game ever made. It's a shame that Blizzard has moved over to a microtransaction model but I suspect if they ever make a Starcraft 3, that is exactly what it will end up being. Some could argue that Battle.net for Starcraft 2 has already become that.
Do you know what game you have dropped more hours into than any other? Let's hear about it in the comments!