I tracked down the guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing for over 8,000 hours, and came away convinced he was right

No one is as vicious about a game as its most dedicated player. Take a jaunt over to the forums for WoW, or CoD, or Overwatch sometime and you'll see what I mean: Scores of people who play almost nothing but the game in question but have almost nothing positive to say about it.

But not a single irritated MMO player is a patch on my own personal icon of this genre: Herp McDerperson—real name Scott Smith—who I discovered one day when I stumbled on the negative review he left on Steam for Battlezone 98 Redux (BZ98R), Rebellion's 2016 remaster of the original RTS/FPS hybrid from 1998. A negative review which he left, says Steam, after 8,461.1 hours of playtime, then followed up with 600 more.

I've been curious about Smith since before I even began writing about games—a product of both the disparity between his hour-count and his attitude and the authoritative tone of his review (it pretty much kicks off with the statement "This review involves numerous statements of objective fact"). It's a relationship with a single piece of art that I can't really fathom. My favourite game of all time is Morrowind and I've poured a paltry few hundred hours into that. My most-played, according to Steam? Fallout: New Vegas with 650ish hours, a mere 7% of Smith's total in BZ98R. I have only positive things to say about either. Naturally, I had to leverage my position as a PCG writer to reach out to Smith and see if he'd chat about what makes him tick.

"I don't blame people for thinking that something is wrong with me after playing over 8,000 hours of a game only to leave a negative review," says Smith. "Anyone who came back to either BZ1 or BZ2 after a decade or more, specifically the multiplayer, and also sticks around to this day, has something seriously wrong with them."

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