A user shared her mother’s unbelievable playtime in Sid Meier’s Civilization III on Steam, even catching the attention of the developer.
Note: The title image is a collage made from a stock photo and a screenshot from Civilization VI, not of the mother herself (via Pixabay, via Steam).
What game is it about? Sid Meier’s Civilization III – or simply: Civ 3 – is a strategy game developed by the American studio Firaxis, released in 2001. As in other entries in the series, players take control of a civilization and lead it from the Stone Age to the 21st century.
This gameplay offers high replay value and can engage players for many hours. However, very few might reach a playtime that even astonishes the developers (via 3D Juegos).
Mother supposedly played longer than one of the developers worked on it
What kind of playtime is that? A user shared her mother’s impressive playtime on November 24, 2023, on X, formerly Twitter. Her mother spent a total of 16,395 hours with the Complete Edition of the strategy game on Steam, with 32.6 of those in the previous two weeks alone.
That corresponds to a daily playtime of at least 2 hours since the game was released.
As the user “Jenbo” explains, her mother is retired. She plays Mahjong in the morning and then plays Civilization III in the afternoon, usually choosing Japan. The playtime caught the attention of Soren Johnson, who worked as a designer on the strategy game.
What did the developer say? He shared the post on his own X account and provided additional context: He himself “only” worked 6,480 hours on Civilization III – the mother’s playtime surpasses his working time almost threefold.
The fact that his game is still so loved more than two decades later brings Johnson joy, as he writes in the comments under the post (via X). On one hand, he is happy that someone has spent so much time with his game; on the other hand, it also gives a sense of “Wow, really?” as noted in another comment (via X).
However, the working time itself didn’t seem to bring Johnson much joy. In his post, he writes that he worked almost nonstop for 18 months and put in 80-hour weeks. However, he might have slightly overestimated his working time due to being away for a few weeks at the beginning of his time at Firaxis.
In the summer of 2001, the year Civ 3 was released, he cannot remember taking any vacation at all. It was very difficult to finish it, Johnson says (via X).
How does such playtime come about? In principle, it is difficult to determine how many hours were actually played actively, or if the game was just kept open for a long time. Nonetheless, playtimes in the five-digit range are not an isolated case. Players of a classic MMORPG are particularly known for setting themselves always new, extreme challenges they can sink their teeth into:
Steam: After 22,000 hours, a player finds all boss items in his MMORPG as the first human worldwide
