Patterson says he fell in love with the game immediately upon picking up the PlayStation 4 version, and that’s where his quest for immersion began. After spending hours exploring, Patterson found himself craving deeper immersion. He first upgraded to a 32-inch curved television and loved the experience, but still wasn’t done yet.

The husband and father isn’t a first-time explorer. He’s put countless hours into space sims like Elite: Dangerous already, so exploring the vast and lonely reaches is already something he’d put in the work for.

Patterson wrote in a column for Polygon this week that he’s spent well-over $4,000 in his quest. And unlike so many other stories about No Man’s Sky, this isn’t one of disappointment. Patterson doesn’t regret a dollar of it.

How much have you spent on one game? I’d be willing to bet it pales in comparison to the amount of money gamer Blake Patterson has dumped into his pursuit of the ultimate No Man’s Sky experience.

Next, he dropped the cash to build a high-end gaming rig meant to play the game at an absolute minimum of 60 frames per second, building a Windows gaming PC with a top-of-the-line Core i7-6700K processor and an overclocked GeForce GTX 1080. To play the game on PC, he had to start from scratch with a new copy, but didn’t hesitate to do so.

He started to invest even more in the game at that point, picking up clothing, posters, and the big Explorer’s Edition box set – yes, a third copy – of the game.

Finally, he decided to upgrade from his 1080p Samsung display to a 75Hz 1440p display.

While Patterson has purchased a few other games, they have very little play time, and he openly admits that he considers all these purchases to be “money spent on No Man’s Sky.” Even his daily computing happens on another piece of hardware.

This is a different story altogether

Most of the word surrounding No Man’s Sky, in case you’ve been living under a rock, has not been positive.

Patterson is in an especially unique situation, being able to spend so much on one game without hesitation, and he certainly doesn’t seem like he’s in the poor house having done so. But it shows that there’s room for love for this widely-maligned game. He had a very different experience than the one I had.

All of this makes Patterson sound like a newbie to the gaming scene, but he founded the iOS game review site TouchArcade and has a retro-computing blog as well. As much vitriol has been leveled at No Man’s Sky, it’s still a game people put tons of work into and have been updating like crazy, and it’s cool to see someone enjoying it so much.