Whether its a point of pride or a source of shame, we've all sat around playing video games for a much longer amount of time than is probably reasonable. Or appropriate. Or healthy.

Sexy Halo Time

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Ocarina Speed Run

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The MMO Loot Lust is Real

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MMOs are Dangerous Things

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Sucked into a Virtual Farm

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Dotaaaaaaaa

College? Who Needs It.

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Fleeting Starcraft Friendships

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Marathoning for Charity

Become the Bat... for Three Straight Days

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Downing Hardcore Diablo

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Old School LAN

Sometimes it's for charity. Other times it's just for the love of the game. Whatever the reason, these are the stories of our longest gaming marathons:First, a bit of background information. In high school, my friends called me "Albino." And because swear words are hilarious, I hosted Albino's Sexy Summer (ASS) Party. I know. I invited a few dozen friends over for an entire weekend, and we hooked up tons of Xboxes for some Halo 2 gaming goodness. From Friday night to Sunday afternoon we played so much Team Slayer and CTF that our eyes bled, with only brief breaks to jump in the pool or chip away at a huge keg... of root beer. Cleaning up and hauling a dozen huge CRT TVs while sleep deprived was a horrible thing. - Brian AlbertMy friends and I were looking at the Guinness Book of World Records for Video Games, and we saw that the record time for beating The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was something like five and a half hours (without hacking the game). Inspired, my friend and I decided to give it a shot, with a small handicap. If we didn't go for anything extra - no heart containers, no magic spells, no ice arrow etc. - it really wouldn't take that long. The only variable would be the dreaded water temple.So I doubled the record time and rounded up and set the limit for 12 hours. On our first the N64 broke right when we became Adult Link. A few months later we tried again, stumbled through the Water Temple, and gave up completely on when we hit the Spirit Temple. Our third try we came close, but were over by 45 minutes. Finally on our fourth try, almost two years after setting out self-imposed limit, we did it: we beat Ocarina in 11 hours and 24 minutes. We had 36 minutes to spare and it was glorious. - Alex SolomitaThis might be more of a cautionary tale for how incredibly addictive a MMORPGs can be, but my longest gaming marathon would have to be about 30 hours in one sitting playing Aion Online. It started off innocent: grind for exp with some friends, join in on some PvP, and weird dance parties in the middle of Sanctum. But it somehow devolved into hours and hours of grinding in one instance over and over in hopes of a pair of extendable daggers dropping. I never got those daggers. I'm not really allowed to play MMOs anymore... - Michael HuynhMy longest gaming marathon would probably have been back when I was around 16 and hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft. In the summer holidays I'd stay up later and later to play, until eventually I was going to bed at around 5am in the morning and waking up at 9am to start playing again. By that stage my sleep pattern was so borked the only way to solve it was do a "soft reset" as it were, which involved me staying up for a full day, followed by a full night, followed by ANOTHER full day and then going to bed at a reasonable hour. So I guess I must have racked up a marathonsomewhere in the region of 36 hours? I really, really don't recommend it. I'm a grumpy sod with anything less than six hours sleep so my temperament in those days was definitely not so hot... - Luke KarmaliBelieve it or not, the longest time I spent playing a game in one sitting was when I played Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility.I remember there was one day where I spent hours and hours planting turnips, sheering sheep, working a part-time job and pursuing the local blacksmith. I can't remember how long I actually played for, but I do remember being startled when I looked out the window and noticed the early morning sun was now sinking into the western horizon. Even then, I think I only left the game long enough to eat dinner and blink the sand from my eyes before going back to my (digital) farm. - Meghan SullivanThe Dota 2 bug bit me hard at the end of 2013, but this summer I played 20 matches in a single Saturday. Dota 2 matches average 30-45 minutes, plus the time it takes to matchmake into the next one. I lost track of how long I actually spent on Steam that day. Like a junkie to his drug, I returned the next day for a similar, but not quite as shameful, repeat performance on Sunday. I consumed whatever leftover pizza I had from the original marathon, and arrived to work on Monday marveling over our obsessive weekend with my IGN Editor teammates. - Mitch DyerI literally skipped an entire week of college the week Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out. At first, I was just going to miss my morning class (due to pulling an all night marathon after the midnight release) but that snowballed in to seven straight days of jacking cars, running missions, and (virtual) working out to classic west coast hip-hop. When I reemerged into the world, my professors had thought I dropped their classes.... priorities. - Darren BrazilI got hooked playing Starcraft for almost 2 days straight. My Garbage 2.0 album was playing on loop in the background (amazing album), so it was difficult to comprehend that time was passing. I had also gotten grouped with a few amazing guys from Hawaii and to this day I'm bummed I never exchanged personal info with them.Anyway, we were such an amazing team, we didn't wanna lose our mojo, so we just kept playing for almost 2 days straight destroying everyone we were teamed up against. When the sun came up the first time, I got a bit anxious and thought maybe I should go to bed, but that thought passed quickly as I got sucked into yet another game. When I saw the sun rising the second time, I realized I had a problem. I was exhausted, I was hungry (luckily I had chips and soda), and I really needed a shower. Upon that realization, I just quickly quit the game and passed out on my bed. - Vasilis SiskosMy longest marathon has to have been when I took on the Extra Life challenge back in 2011. I was a month away from my big move to the United States (to go work for IGN no less) and was living in a temporary dwelling that proved unexpectedly perfect for my gaming binge. The space was 300 square feet with one small window and a hang around chair – perfect. As per the terms of the challenge, I played for 24 hours straight without sleep. Thankfully I had loaded up on snacks and coffee and devised an ingenious interval program. Hot Pursuit served as my mindless gaming portion, while probing the planets for anomalies in Mass Effect 2, which sounds inadvertently worse now that I think about it, served as my main regimen. It was glorious. - Naomi Kyle2013 was an awesome year for video games. It was also an awesome year for video game marathons, because I finally tried my hand at livestreaming video games for charity. With the help of my video game streaming community at Vidyashorts.com , I played through not one but three Batman Arkham games - starting with Arkham Asylum and ending with Arkham Origins. We called it: The Dark Knight Before Christmas.I played from December 21st through the 23rd in nonstop crime-fighting rush that nearly did me in, and as donations came in, I upped the challenges. I played in a Batman snuggie wearing Batman themed stockings over my hands, growled like Christian Bale for hours on end, drank a disgusting concoction I nicknamed Venom, and even constructed a Batman out of Playdoh. By the end of the charity stream my sanity had left me, but we had managed to raise over two thousand dollars for Childs Play Charity. Any superhero could tell you that's a battle worth fighting. - Brendan GraeberIn the infancy of my Youtube career I decided it would be a good idea to run a live stream with three other Youtubers for the launch of Diablo 3 We lost our first ally in the Fields of Misery, which despite the intimidating nature of the name is only about an hour into the game. Three of us made it past the first act with ease, but in the opening moments of act two we came across the "Crumbling Vault", a timed event where our party would race to find a treasure room before the dungeon collapsed and killed us all. For some terrible reason we decided to give it a try, but soon realized we would be unable to find the treasure in time. As we headed for the exit we came across an elite pack of sand serpents. My allies cowered in fear as our only exit was now blocked. But I had a plan, with a mighty leap I jumped clear of the enemy pack and left all of my friends to die. I wasn't proud, but I was alive.Eighteen or so hours later I killed Diablo, and then slept for days. - James DugganWhen Microsoft published Windows 95, they included built-in support for TCP/IP networking, a feature that made network gaming more accessible than ever before. University computer labs were transformed overnight into arenas for multiplayer Red Alert matches, and a cottage industry of mom-and-pop LAN gaming centers sprang up in college towns all over the US. I was a card-carrying charter member of Virtual Realm, a short-lived storefront PC arcade stocked with nine networked Pentium-powered PCs and a fridge full of Surge.One long day and night and day in 1998, I joined seven friends for an epic Quake Team Fortress tournament which began at 10AM Saturday and stretched until the Mexican lunch buffet opened next door late on Sunday morning. Three pizza runs, seventy burritos, and about a thousand frags into the 24 hour gaming session, we realized that we smelled really bad and should probably go home and shower. We headed back to the dorm, bathed, caught a few hours shuteye, and then woke up and played a little Goldeneye for good measure. - Jared Petty

Go on. This is a safe space. Share your longest gaming marathon in the comments below. It's a judgment-free zone - you're with friends.