History Main / MarathonLevel

*** In ''Gran Turismo 4'', the longest endurance races could be softened somewhat by switching between A-Spec (driver) and B-Spec (manager) mode, effectively serving as swapping drivers. ''Gran Turismo 5'' separates the A-Spec and B-Spec career paths, so entering a 24 Hours race in A-Spec requires actually driving solo for 24 real-life hours with no driver swaps. This is in itself [[ArtisticLicenseSports artistic license]] (as no 1-driver team has ever been allowed on the Le Mans start grid, with even Edward Hall in 1950 having had a reserve driver available if needed), although players in ''Gran Turismo 5'' can suspend and resume the race in-progress while in for pit stops, which certainly helps on that early [=PlayStation=] 3 "Fat" models were known to have ventilation issues.

** Then there are the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin endurance races]]. The shortest consists of 30 laps around Special Stage Route 11 in the first game, which will take a little under an hour. The longest are the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 24 Hours of Nürburgring, both of which are in ''5'' only. Your best bet is to either get some friends to help you out, pause the game after running for 2 hours and leave the console on for several days in a row, or [[AntiPoopSocking use B-Spec mode]], which shortens the race to a more bearable 8 hours when sped up. It also lets the AI do all the driving, so you can do something else while your B-Spec driver does the racing, but you still gotta be there so you can tell him to actually pit. ''4'' also has the 1000 miles! series, a series of four 250-mile endurance races that take at least three hours each.

[[folder:Driving Game]]
* The Nürburgring Nordschleife (aka "[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast the Green Hell]]") counts as this by default in any racing game it appears in. It's 21km long, and the real-world lap record is 6 minutes and 25 seconds. The endurance circuit, which combines the Nordschleife with the GP track, is ''26km'' long with a lap record of over ''8'' minutes. See also its real-life entry below.
* ''BAJA: Edge of Control'' has ''3-hour long'' BAJA 1000 races. Keep in mind that these races are on extremely rough terrain, with trucks that require players to monitor heat, clutch damage, and suspension damage.
* ''VideoGame/MarioKart'':
** ''VideoGame/MarioKart64'':
*** Rainbow Road. So long, a controller pack usually doesn't have enough memory to save a track ghost. It can take up to two minutes to complete a lap. And you have to do three laps. When the track was remastered for ''VideoGame/MarioKart8'', it was made a lot shorter, by making you only do one lap around the course, divided into three segments.
*** Wario Stadium is a big, maze-like track built within an extreme sports stadium; the game's manual states that its length will make it tough for players to stay concentrated in the race.
** ''VideoGame/MarioKartSuperCircuit'': Bowser Castle 4 has a long, complex layout where drivers have to take many sharp turns and jump various successive gaps; and it still has to be traversed in three laps. When the track returned in ''VideoGame/MarioKartTour'', the race was reduced to a single lap divided in two segments.
** The All Cup Tour in ''VideoGame/MarioKartDoubleDash'', featuring all 16 tracks, which takes about 45 minutes to do on 50cc, and a bit less in faster difficulty levels. For individual racetracks, there's Wario Colosseum, whose length means that you only have to complete two laps around it instead of the usual three.
** Waluigi Pinball in ''VideoGame/MarioKartDS'' is the longest track in the entire game. Unlike most examples here however, the track itself is fairly straightforward to complete and actually fairly short when compared to most tracks in other Mario Kart games.
** Rainbow Road in ''VideoGame/MarioKart7'' is long enough that it's also one long lap around the course, divided into three segments, rather than one whole lap. It's one of three courses in its game to be a three segment course rather than a three lap one, the others being the two Wuhu Island courses (Wuhu Loop, where you loop around Wuhu Island; and Maka Wuhu, where you drive up Maka Wuhu then glide back to the beach).
* The average time for a race in most tracks in ''VideoGame/FZeroGX'' hovers between 1 to 2 minutes, maybe 3 on a particularly high difficulty track. The final track of the AX Cup, Green Plant Spiral, takes an average player over ''4'' minutes to complete. This is because it was designed to be played on an arcade machine, and thus the track's increased length is broken up into checkpoints along the way, which you can still see in ''GX'' despite them being functionally useless.
* The ''VideoGame/GranTurismo'' series, as well as the Nürburging, features the fictional (but based on a real location in Spain) Circuito de la Sierra (about 27km).
** As if the previous variants of the Test Course weren't long enough, ''Gran Turismo 5'' adds Special Stage Route X, a 30km oval with 2 10km straights, intended to allow the fastest cars in the game to reach their maximum speed.
** Then there are the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin endurance races]]. The shortest consists of 30 laps around Special Stage Route 11 in the first game, which will take a little under an hour. The longest are the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 24 Hours of Nürburgring, both of which are in ''5'' only. Your best bet is to either get some friends to help you out, pause the game after running for 2 hours and leave the console on for several days in a row, or [[AntiPoopSocking use B-Spec mode]], which shortens the race to a more bearable 8 hours when sped up. It also lets the AI do all the driving, so you can do something else while your B-Spec driver does the racing, but you still gotta be there so you can tell him to actually pit. ''4'' also has the 1000 miles! series, a series of four 250-mile endurance races that take at least three hours each.
* ''VideoGame/ProjectCARS'' makes races incredibly long to even start with long practice and qualification sessions depending on what you set it to. An average Career race at 100% time progression can take half an hour just for practice (then again that extra time can really help set up your car and pit strategy), a quarter hour for qualification and the main race being anywhere between ten and fifteen laps. Then you get to some of the specific endurance events such as the 3-Hour [=McLaren=] F1 Challenge that, even at 1%, will still take half an hour. Then there's Endurance races that take up to ''twelve hours'', and then finally the UsefulNotes/TwentyFourHoursOfLeMans that puts you in a race for, well, twenty four hours.
* ''VideoGame/OutRun 2'''s derivatives (since ''SP'') add "15-stage Continuous" mode into the mix, where you must drive a Ferrari road car throughout 15 stages [[ArrangeMode in a pre-determined order]] continuously. If you are skilled and don't crash on any car or barrier, this doesn't need 15 minutes to finish, but even for a Ferrari vehicle, driving this way would render a serious issue.
* ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight'' has the Metropolitian Highway (Tokyo) time attack course, which combines all four Tokyo courses into a 60 km romp and takes over 12 minutes to complete with a fully-tuned car. ''Maximum Tune 3'' adds the Kanagawa version, which is a 35 km runthrough of Yokohane Line and Wangan Line that takes about 7 minutes to complete with the same kind of car; ''Maximum Tune 4'' expands this to also cover the Minato Mirai route for a 48 km ride that takes a little over 9 minutes. The Japanese version of ''Maximum Tune 5'' has the Sub-Center version which is just slightly under ''70 kilometers'' long and takes nearly 15 minutes to finish, again with a full-tuned vehicle! \\
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Due to their lengths, playing one of these courses requires you to insert an additional credit. As shown in an alert when you choose these courses in ''Maximum Tune 3'' onward, ''DO NOT'' allow another player to challenge you while racing either of these courses, or you will lose the additional credit you inserted and have to insert credits again to take another shot at either course.
* ''VideoGame/FatalRacing'''s 3rd bonus race takes around 15 minutes to finish on [[EasyModeMockery Girlie mode]]... and over 40 minutes on a good day on [[HarderThanHard Impossible]], with low damage. Every other course can be finished (1st place, all laps done) in under 15 minutes on Impossible, even with high damage and a full house of 16 cars (15 or 14 computers). It is highly suspected that this is due to a mistake in the course's configuration. This is also one of the few tracks with unavoidable damage due to long jumps and the ''only'' track with moving ramps that can tilt beyond the vertical, causing you to ricochet off the walls and slam into the ground upside down in the middle of a very narrow track with no room for the other drivers to avoid you ([[SpitefulAI not that they care]]). In short, unless you are playing on low damage (which defeats the point of the game) you either run out of lives and die in the first three or so laps or you survive only to see everyone else run out of lives and die, leaving you [[AfterTheEnd alone on the track for the next half an hour]].
* Most licensed UsefulNotes/FormulaOne games allow you to go the full distance of the real-life races, which all total up to around 190 miles (with the exception of Monaco, which ''still'' ends up being one of the longest races on the calendar just because it's slow). Furthermore, while real-world F1 races will time-out after two hours, not every F1 game includes this rule.
* ''VideoGame/{{Forza}}'':
** The first three ''Motorsport'' games (and ''6'' as a showcase event category) had endurance races. In the first, the average time to complete one was about 45 minutes. The second bumped this up to an hour, and the third made it about 65-70 minutes. The two longest ones in ''3'' were the 17 lap (238 km) Le Mans race and 187 km Nürburgring race, the two tracks that are already marathon courses in their own right (see Real Life section below).
** A limited-time only multiplayer lobby in ''Motorsport 4'' had players race at Le Mans (which is by no means short) for ''three hundred and sixty laps''. The absolute fastest lap time recorded is 3 minutes, 6 seconds. That's at least ''eighteen hours'' of racing, six hours short of the Le Mans 24h. Players who posted a picture of them on lap 360 were gifted a unique "Unicorn" car [[note]]Generally rare, ultra-high-performance versions (such as the Mazda RX-7 Spirit R) of regular in-game cars.[[/note]] by the developers, which cannot be acquired in the game normally.
** The ''Horizon'' series isn't exempt either. The "Horizon Finale" event in ''2'' has you [[AllTheWorldsAreAStage driving through every town in the game in one super-circuit.]] The "Goliath Circuit" in ''3'' (which shows up once you level Byron Bay up to level 5) is a similar trek. ''Horizon 4'' adds multiple marathon races for various disciplines, and ''Horizon 5'' adds all the same ones to its even bigger map and even adds an extra-long Trailblazer PR stunt called "The Juggernaut" for good measure.
** ''7'' has the "Survival of the Fastest" achievement, for which you have to win the Spa-Francorchamps 100 Showcase Event with the race length set to Extra Long, which is 69 laps for this course, or up to three hours. Better yet is the Sebring 300, the longest race in the Driver's Cup, whose Extra Long version is 243 laps, and can over 10 hours to complete. In Free Play or Multiplayer mode, the race length may be set up to ''1000'' laps for a circuit race or 24 hours for a timed race; [[BladderOfSteel god help you if you participate in a multiplayer race of this length]].
* ''VideoGame/RidgeRacer V'' has the 99 Trial mode, which is literally a 99-lap race around the Sunny Beach course. You need to get first place in the race to get the ultimate prize ([[AWinnerIsYou it's just an in-game trophy, which the game built up way too much]]).
* ''VideoGame/NeedForSpeed'':
** ''VideoGame/NeedForSpeedShift'' has one set of races designed to infuriate anyone going for 100% completion: Endurance. It consists of 5 races: 3 of them are 10 laps on ostensibly long tracks (the famed Spa-Francorchamps being one of them), one of them is 30 laps on a tiny figure-eight track, and then 3 laps on the legendary Nordschleife. THEN you get to challenge the 'Endurance champion' to complete the race sets. Even with heavily modified Tier 3 vehicles, the entire thing will take you a good 2-3 hours.
** ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeedHotPursuit2010 Hot Pursuit (2010)]]'' has Seacrest Tour, a roughly ''44'' mile race that will take a player likely 15 minutes to complete. It tends to be a CurbStompBattle if one should make too many mistakes.
** ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeedMostWanted Most Wanted]]'' 2005 has several of them:
*** Hastings, a 3-lap circuit race with lots of sharp turns taking place across Downtown Rockport and Camden Beach, with one lap taking 3 minutes. The ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeedMostWantedPepegaEdition Pepega Edition]]'' variant, "Motherfucking Hastings", is even longer.
*** Petersburg & Camden, a Tollbooth race that takes place across the whole map, covering nearly every single tollbooth in Rockport, which takes about 8 minutes to complete.
*** Challenges #60 and #68 in the Challenge Series require the player to survive a pursuit at a high heat level for 15 minutes and 30 minutes respectively.
** The 2012 version of ''Most Wanted'' has "Around the World" from the ''Ultimate Speed Pack'' DLC, a sprint race with a length of 13.1 miles. For reference, the longest sprint races from the base game, "Crashdown" and "Park and Country", both have a length of 4.8 miles.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fuel}}'' has Endurance races, which take at least 20 minutes to complete, but then there is the Mt. Rainier Endurance race, the last of them all, where you have to cover 100 miles of offroading up and down mountainsides in a Muscle Car that is built for going offroad. It takes an hour and 15 minutes to finish. made worse by the level getting glitchy from the chunk loading process.
* The aptly named Gigatrack in ''VideoGame/{{Trials}} Evolution''. In a game where 2 minutes is normally the average track length, this one can take well over 15 minutes to complete.
* ''VideoGame/{{Wipeout}} HD'' has an achievement for causing the Time Trial lap counter to roll over. It rolls over at 99 laps.
* At the end of every season in VideoGame/{{GRiD}}'s career mode you can race the (12 minute long) UsefulNotes/TwentyFourHoursOfLeMans, easily the longest, and toughest, race in career mode. If you're feeling up to it, you can actually do a quick race version that goes for anywhere from 12 minutes to [[BladderOfSteel 24 hours]], depending on how daring you're feeling.
* ''VideoGame/TestDriveUnlimited'':
** During a playthrough of the solo missions, there's a large amount of these races. The infamous Island Tour for example. You're very quick if you manage this 200-km (!) long race with a fully-tuned Saleen S7 TT or [=McLaren=] F1, both of which run up to around 262 MPH flat-out (and there's a lot of straights in the game) in less than half an hour. Or the Millionaires' Challenge, another entire island tour -- this time with a ''timer'' (that's set to an hour!) and ''traffic''. Both of these races are nightmares. And then there's still the damn car delivery missions. Long tracks in high traffic and you lose a LOT of money if the car so much as get scratched. ''TDU'' is a good contestant for being the king of Marathon Levels in racing games.
** The [=PS2=] version of the game has the King of the Hill series of races, with "Coastal Dream" being the longest race of all time with 166 km in Class A supercars. It takes more than 46-50 minutes to complete.
* Certain faction missions in ''VideoGame/TheCrew'' can keep you on the road for upwards of an hour (with at least one mission lasting over two hours in length). The developer, Ivory Tower, is comprised of a number of talents who previously worked on the aforementioned ''Test Drive Unlimited'' series so there is some precedent for this. Particular standouts include Los Angeles's Highway Child, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a run around the U.S. through the highways]] clocking in at 1.5 hours, Miami's Showtime at 2, but the grand daddy of it all has to be Landmark Tour at Las Vegas. How long is it? It clocks in at a ''whopping 4 hours''. Sure, you can pause if you're running solo, but if you're with another player? BladderOfSteel mandatory.
* The 1996 ''Network Q RAC Rally Championship'' rally sim by Magnetic Fields has the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5icykTeyBiI Pundershaw stage]] as part of its championship calendar for the annual British rally. It's the longest stage in the game. And, to date, also the longest ever stage in any rally game. How long? It's up to ''59 in-game kilometers, and takes up to 25 minutes to complete'' from start to finish. Yeah... The game has plenty of other long stages too (though none approaching the length of this one), and there's a very good reason why the key for "Pause" is listed among the main gameplay keys, rather than an afterthought.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/Mobil1RallyChampionship'' from the same game series also has stages based on real-life British rally stages, with similar lengths. Pundershaw has been shortened to 42.82 km here, which is still 17 to 18 minutes.
* ''VideoGame/TrackMania'' has much shorter races than most driving games: point-to-point races are rarely longer than a minute, and multi-lap races are usually 3 laps and take under two minutes total. Then ''Nations'' hits you with D-15 Endurance, a 10-lap race that will take you around 8 minutes. As if that wasn't enough, the very last track, E-05 Endurance, is a 60-lap monster where [[NintendoHard the Author time]] is almost exactly an hour. With the series' famed LevelEditor, there's nothing stopping you from making Marathon Levels of your own - in ''2'', you can create races that are ''thousands'' of laps long.
* ''VideoGame/DaytonaUSA'' can have the race length set by the operator to up to 500 laps on the Beginner track, 250 on Advanced, and 125 on Expert. And since this is an arcade game with no pausing, you better have a BladderOfSteel.
* ''VideoGame/{{Redout}}'' has the Boss race mode, which uses teleporters to connect all five of an environment's tracks together into one circuit. There's a reason the story events are only ever two laps of a Boss.
* ''VideoGame/LeMans24'' in Endurance mode mimics the 24-hour race format with each in-game hour corresponding to 20 seconds real time on default settings for a total of 8 minutes, and 40 seconds real time on longest settings for a total of 16 minutes.
* Modders for several sim titles (including ''VideoGame/RFactor'' and ''VideoGame/AssettoCorsa'') have created the 44 mile/70 km lap of the Targa Florio course - a real road race in Sicily held until the 1970s - a very twisty mountainous course that takes around half an hour to lap at speed. There are also mods to include Isle of Man TT course (see Real Life section) into them.
* ''VideoGame/TestDrive: Le Mans'' lets you play the UsefulNotes/TwentyFourHoursOfLeMans in real time. You can save, but only on pit stops.
* ''VideoGame/{{Wreckfest}}'' features a special stage ported from another Creator/BugbearEntertainment game, ''VideoGame/RallyTrophy'', that is over ''11 kilometers long'' and takes about six minutes for a single lap.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Racing]]
* ''VideoGame/FZero99'': Mini Prixs and Grand Prixs are gauntlets where you race multiple consecutive tracks in a row with no breaks. Mini Prixs consist of three random regular tracks, while Grand Prixs are based on the Knight, Queen and King Grand Prixs from the original SNES game and consist of five tracks each. Unlike normal races, the player pool is culled by at least 19/20 players at the end of each race; furthermore, your placement in each race rewards rank points that are used to calculate your final standing. Participating in a Prix rewards points that go towards the weekly Leaderboards, giving you a chance to put your name on the map for fame and glory.

** ''Need for Speed: Shift'' has one set of races designed to infuriate anyone going for 100% completion: Endurance. It consists of 5 races: 3 of them are 10 laps on ostensibly long tracks (the famed Spa-Francorchamps being one of them), one of them is 30 laps on a tiny figure-eight track, and then 3 laps on the legendary Nordschleife. THEN you get to challenge the 'Endurance champion' to complete the race sets. Even with heavily modified Tier 3 vehicles, the entire thing will take you a good 2-3 hours.
** ''Hot Pursuit'' 2010 has Seacrest Tour, a roughly ''44'' mile race that will take a player likely 15 minutes to complete. It tends to be a CurbStompBattle if one should make too many mistakes.