"the most I ever spend on a game at any one time is about six hours (and that's generally a Friday when I work from home)."

haha, i wonder how many other people this relates to who don't actually do this for a living.....

My longest game session was about 14 hours long, around at a mates house having a few drinks, playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Thought it might be time to go home when the sun started coming up.

I played Chaos Gate (a Warhammer 40k turnbased game)for about 9 hours straight the first time I saw it - it took Britney Spears in red leather on the tele in the next room to pry me away from it. Once I was away from it I realised I hadn't eaten or peed for a very long time.

The only recent times I have done this is playing through the Halo games in co-op mode with one of my friends. The main driver being the lack of times when we are both free to play.

Playing RPGs I found the lure of one more mission would cause sleep to be lost.

These days playing for more than an hour is enough to peeve the significant other.

Assassins Creed 2 is a bit like that for me at the moment. But that could be making up for lost gaming time as I finally have a PS3 again...

Unfortunately (kinda) not a 60gb model, as they wanted to give me a refurbished model with bugger all warranty. In the end I got a full refund of the purchase price (2 years ago, PS3 60gb = $1200) so went and bought a new slim ps3 and a tonne of games. YAy

Diablo2, Halo3(with a mate) have been my usual suspects.

I think it has more to do with having to play at night when the other half is asleep. Time flies too quickly with games and it seems that only a 6 or 8 hour stint will scratch the itch..

Currently... Mass Effect 2! what a brilliant game, it occupied me for most of the long weekend up here and yet it still seems like there is so much to do in the game... like I'll just go explore this system, now I'll just go and talk to Garrus again... oh hey now I can go buy that sniper rifle upgrade. I still managed to maintain a socially acceptable level of conversation and meal time with my girlfriend though.

But I would have to admit this pales into insignificance compared to Baldur's Gate 2. I was at uni and working at the Warehouse over the holidays, normally 8am-6pm. I would get home, have some dinner, fire up the game around 7pm, start playing, and then ignore everything else until I happened to glance at my watch around 4am and realise it was really time to get some sleep. I apologise to any customers I was unnecessarily rude to because of my tiredness (although some of them probably deserved it).

I've never really done anything marathon as far as an individual session goes, probably managed something in the order of 14 hours when GTA San Andreas came out, hardly epic compared to the hours some spend but it was in the middle of exams. Maybe Rockstar are trying to make me fail because GTA IV came out when I was in the middle of studying for CFA exams too...

hmmmm my longest in recent memory was AC2...went to the midnight release @ riccarton mall...went home to just give the game a wee try.....I swear I only wanted to do the first 2 missions tops!!...ended up going to bed for about 45mins sleep....got up at 7 & seriously considered throwing a sicky!! That night I played it from about 8pm-6am getting me over halfway through. It was sooooooooooo worth it & I will more than likely be up til ridiculously early hours on work nights next week...the thing is I even had to hold on for dear life (numerous times) to go to the bathroom...bcos I couldn't quite pry myself away...close call I tell you!

I took last Friday off work for a gaming marathon. Between Friday morning and Monday evening I only managed about 12 hours sleep in total. One hell of a way to spend a weekend.

A game springs to mind that I first played back in '98. I was at a good friends place and had hired a couple of games out, this particular game being a game neither of us had ever heard of before, we relied on our gamer instincts: 'Well it's new(ish), we've never heard of it before, we may as well give it a go...'. After playing it for around 2 hours, it went straight from the playstation back into its case and we vowed never to rely on these instincts when hiring out games ever again.

Just so happened around a year later I was handed a pile of games from a friend who no longer wanted them and lo and behold, the same game we had hired a year before was amongst the game titles my friend had generously bestowed upon me, only this time I'd noticed from the CD case cover that it had gone Platinum. I thought 'Well if it's gone platinum then it's GOTTA be a good game...'. Very reluctantly I threw the disc in and gave it a solid 12 hours of playing.

12 hours may not be a long stretch but after playing this game for 12 hours and eventually succumbing to a gamers worst enemy, sleep, this game continued to dominate everything in my life for the next 3-4 months. I was in high school and had a girlfriend at the time so basically my life was school then playing this game, the girlfriend and homework came a distant 3rd. Even after finishing this game I was so obssessed with trying to complete everything and get everything one could get in the game that by the time I had put this game back on the shelf, I'd finished it at least 9 to 10 times. I made a book with all my notes regarding this game on what I had completed, how I had completed it and what else I though needed completing (We never had internet at home), and even today I'll pop this game into my 60gig ps3 and have a play just for laughs. What is this game you ask?

Final Fantasy VII.