I can’t talk due to the endless whooping, so instead I’ll type! And what better thing to type when I’m sick than a brief history of the few times in my long and storied life when I have stayed up all night in the name of video-gaming.
Note that this list is probably not exhaustive, but I think it is close. I’m trying here to describe the games that for various reasons I played so madly they made me skip sleep!
Gauntlet (Commodore 64)
The C64 version of Gauntlet lacked a pause button (recall that this was well before the days of game saves). I was pretty good at the game and could play for very long periods without dying. Eventually I noticed I could play more or less indefinitely, and so did just that over one Saturday night. I started after mum and dad went to bed and played all through the night, probably wanting to get to the dragon level or something like that. I was using the warrior. My game became a marathon and continued all the way to Sunday baked lunch, at which point mum made me stop playing to eat. At this point I had about 9999 life (the maximum) and had observed that since life decreased at the rate of 1 point per second I could just walk away from the game for hours assuming I parked myself out of harms way. I believe I could have played forever, but I have no memory of how I actually ended that game.
Alleykat (Commodore 64)
Your guess is as good as mine as to what I found so compelling about this Andrew Braybrook game. The marathon occurred in about ’87, and I played the game from start to end many times in one credit. I had moved the TV into my room and sat on my bed playing hour after hour all through the night. Some time around this period I may have done the same with Ranarama but I can’t recall with certainty like I can Alleykat.
Shadowrun (Super Nintendo)
Looking back it is somewhat amusing I never actually bought this game. In fact it is perhaps the best SNES RPG I don’t own, and this is what led to the marathon. You see it was a one-night rental (such things were common then) and I was apparently far too cheap to simply rent the game a few extra nights and instead vowed to beat it in the one day alloted. And I did, although it meant no sleep – not much of anything actually save playing the game. This was about 1994 if memory serves me correctly. (By the way, the SNES Shadowrun is a completely different game from the – also superb – Genesis Shadowrun, which I do own!)
Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (TG-16)
The game was on loan from a friend (Vic Ireland, of Working Designs) and I discovered that I could place the character in a certain position in the mine level and the enemies would infinitely respawn. I quickly surmised if I put something on the attack button I could ‘farm’ them for as long as I wanted. This I did, and then went to bed (so this is not really all all-nighter). The next morning my character was maximum level, making the rest of the game a walk in the park. Somewhat of an amusing memory for me, this is.
Might & Magic 3 (Super Nintendo)
Back when I did the fanzine, as luck would have it one of my readers worked for FCI. This was a company that licensed and translated Japanese RPGs into English. He liked my work and sent me the odd game or two. One day I was surprised to receive an EEPROM (basically the innards of a cartridge) of a half-finished M&M3 for the SNES. There was no save game facility so I had to leave the SNES on to keep playing. I went one step further and left myself on as well, playing for many hours on end through the night. I had beaten the game several times on PC so I knew various tricks and was able to get quite far in a short time, finding many bugs in the process. To this day I have no idea if I ever got a test play credit since I never got the final game because FCI went belly-up simultaneous with its release.
That’s it; a short list but one that has many memories for me.
Oh there have been other times when I have gone on crazed game marathons. These include World Of Warcraft, various Monster Hunter games, Angband and even (IIRC) The Great Giana Sisters (MMN and I played this well into the night one time at his house). But only the four games listed above are the times I can remember skipping sleep entirely in the name of gaming 🙂
