Mail order monsters

The Bards Tale (OG)

FF Tactics

Bushido Blade

Vagrant Story

And Terraria most recently.

My most played Steam game is hilariously Tametsi. It's a Minesweeper spin-off with different layouts and shapes and zero guessing required for its ~200 puzzles. Some of the later puzzles require some absolutely bonkers chains of logic to figure out. It helps there's a fantastic YouTube series of videos by innocentive going through puzzle solutions that are some of the most relaxing and entertaining things I've ever watched. He almost always points to the next thing you need to consider first, so you can just pause a video after he mentions where the next step is and follow the logic yourself rather than spending hours hunting for it.

World of Warcraft. I don't even try to think about quitting anymore.

Football Manager. A damn spreadsheet game 😭

Souls games.

Dark Souls 1 and Hollow Knight

Duke Nukem 3D.
Then Quake I and II.
I'm still playing the latter many times a week.

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I'm still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I've always wanted) and I'm getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts... and that's probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.

DOTA 2, man. Once you get past the massive learning curve, there is just so much to do in-game. Every match is entirely unique, with constant updates, tournaments, battle passes, and what have you. When I feel like disappearing, I disappear into DOTA.

Lots, chrono trigger, ffvi-x, Mario 64, basically every yakuza game, sekiro, breath of the wild, a ton more. Embarassing ones sometimes like that power washing game because I got it for free and was like “this will be dumb” then kept going and going and going

Some older games that I’d probably power through now but at the time cheating/save states/youtube wasn’t easily accessible (gamefaqs existed but text based walkthroughs hit much different). Like the ps1 survival horror games: resident evil 1-3, silent hill, Dino crisis, parasite eve, etc. when you know what to do most of those can be run through in a few hours but in 1997 on the original hardware (no save states) and at best a txt file faq to guide you if you get stuck it would take some time to figure it out. Then with ones like re2 that had multiple routes and endings you’d play it like 6-7 times at least

No Man's Sky. Keeps drawing me in.

Homeworld 1, 2, Cataclysm. Forget the latest one.

Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Horizon 1 & 2

So many more...

How can people play single games for thousands of hours ?

I game a lot and my absolute record is maybe ~400h

Fallout. I played 1 and 2 back when they first came out. Great games, great writing, seditious humour ad a real feel of a world.

But then came 3, FNV, and 4. Each of those I played through as my default 'helpful stealth archer' character, then a second time as 'evil melee' character, and then again to make sure I had maxed out each faction and got each ending. And then again, because I loved it, and again to collect all the bobbleheads, magazines, etc.

I'm in my late-50s. I'm already slowing down my career in preparation for retirement, and now I work as a freelance consultant which means I have some control over my working hours. I can't wait for Fallout 5. I will be probably take at least two weeks off work to binge the shit out of it.

Less so with Elder Scrolls 6, but I'll be taking at least a week off to play it when it drops.

Project Zomboid. I have over 1000 hours of playtime. I always come back to this game.

There's many, even from your list. Recently Deadzone: Rogue.

Pretty much everything I’ve ever played. Going all-in on a new hobby for periods of time (before cycling to another interest weeks later) is just how my brain works.

But right now? I’m very into playing Surviving Mars. Something about escaping from Earth and creating a new society on another planet just feels so appealing right now, for some reason. Nervously glances at news headlines

I used to play Tetris on my OG monochrome Gameboy obsessively. I would go through stages where I'd put a fresh set of batteries in and play until they went flat in one go. The only limiting factor on my game time was the availability of AA batteries in the vicinity. It got to the point where I'd be dreaming about playing it, and when putting things away I'd stack things Tetris style and get angry when things wouldn't fit together cleanly.

Then one day I just stopped and never felt the urge again. Thank goodness.

Barotrauma, I checked it out on a free to play weekend a few months back and have been hooked since

Lots of tinkering and the modding community is extensive, best played with friends but the single player is good too

Civ, Balatro.

Path of exile for sure. Everytime there is a new league, i put a lot of hours into it.

Cracktorio

Warframe. I have been clean for years now, but the itch never really goes away

If we’re talking actual legit addiction, to the point of finding it hard to quit, Skyrim and Pokémon (first four generations). Any other game, no matter how much I love it or how many hours I’ve got, I could put away and not touch for a while. When I first got into Skyrim, I played it nonstop for about 3 or 4 years, hours a day every day. After around 5k hours I finally had a hard drive failure which corrupted a save file and I finally took that as a sign to stop playing. I actually stopped playing video games entirely for a while to make sure I didn’t go back to it. About a year ago I figured I’d reinstall it and play again for a bit, immediately sank 50 hours in and uninstalled it before I fell into that rabbit hole again.

Pokemon is similar, though not as bad. But any time I revisit a Pokemon game I have to go through all the games in the first four gens, get super into it with dozens of tabs on individual Pokemon and stats and such, and then I have to stop myself, otherwise I’d probably do the same thing as Skyrim. As a kid growing up I was properly addicted to that series, and as an adult it still hasn’t gone away.

There’s lots of other games I’ve had tons and tons of hours into, but I could hang them up and move on. Skyrim especially but Pokemon too are actual addictions for me.

I have been consistently playing EverQuest for 26 years now. I'm not sure it's a phase.

Morrowind was my big single player addiction. Oblivion and Skyrim were cool but they just never hit quite right.

Multiplayer I was heavy into Halo and Rappelz (some Korean MMO). I woke my brother up by sleep-playing halo, sat in front of the TV wiggling my thumbs on air, and shouted "THEYVE GOT THE FLAG". And would frequently have dreams where the conversation is being held in a floating chat box from rappelz.

League of legends, yes I am a toxic person