Final Fantasy 14 player eats 999 eggs

(Image credit: FX)

Yesterday a man named Ross O'Donovan logged on to Final Fantasy 14 entirely unaware of the events that would follow.  Perhaps he logged on as part of the renewed surge of interest in the MMO that accompanied the game's new patch and huge new free trial. Perhaps he's simply a long-term player.

He logged on innocently, perhaps even naively, expecting to play an MMO. Instead, Ross O'Donovan spent over an hour of his life eating digital hard-boiled eggs. "Logged onto FFXIV and some guy gave me 999 eggs and asked me to eat them," he tweeted at 10:04 PM PST, having then consumed a mere 314 eggs. 

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He quickly gathered an audience, because, let me note, he was doing nothing but standing there eating eggs for a very long time. As he went, he tweeted video updates of his progress, and the crowd grew ever-larger. 

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He pressed on. Despite later tweeting "MY HAND HURTS," he continued for nearly 20 minutes after that point.  Why would he do this, you ask? Because the eggs were there.

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His ordeal concluded at 11:03 PM, just over an hour after he first tweeted. If my math is right, he would have been doing this for some 20-30 minutes before that tweet. O'Donovan's experience is a reminder of everything that is good about MMOs. It's not really the game, though the game is important, it's the community. It is quite literally the friends and egg-eating men we met along the way.

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Despite years of urging by friends, I have not ever tried FF14… but now I want to. Thanks, eggs. 

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.