Man dies after 50-hour computer marathon
10 August 2005
SEOUL: A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an internet cafe.
The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing on-line battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.
Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.
“We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” a Taegu provincial police official said by telephone.
Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the internet cafe.
After he failed to return home, Lee’s mother asked his former colleagues to find him. When they reached the cafe, Lee said he would finish the game and then go home, the paper reported.
He died a few minutes later, it said.
South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a large and highly developed game industry.
I’ve read about people in Taiwan having strokes from their marathon game playing…In fact, the weirdest story I read was about a boy who had played, I think,like, 12 hours straight, no break. So he was admitted to the hospital for exhaustion, and was going to start receiving electrical shock threapy to deal with his ‘addiction’ :loco: :loco:
As bad as some of these pics are, I’ve seen much worse. When I lived in the dorms at Texas Tech a few years ago, there were these two guys who never came out for weeks at a time, ordered pizza everynight, etc. We saw their room one day and LITERALLY every square inch of the room, including the beds, was covered in pizza boxes up past waist high…with layers of clothes mixed in with uneaten pizza crusts. The next year one of them had flunked out and the other got stuck with a frat guy for a roomate. The frat cussed him out for an hour straight and then forced him to go outside, cut his fingernails, open the windows, clean the room etc.