from wikipedia entry on David Hume:
"Education
Hume's family sent him to the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten) at a time when fourteen was normal. At first he considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Vergil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring."[7] He had little respect for professors, telling a friend in 1735, "there is nothing to be learned from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books."
At the age of eighteen, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought," which inspired him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it".[8] He did not recount what this "Scene" was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations.[9] Due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He came on the verge of nervous breakdown, after which he decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning.[10]
[edit] Career
As Hume's options lay between a traveling tutorship and a stool in a merchant's office, he chose the latter. In 1734, after a few months in commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourses with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche. As he spent most of his savings during his four years there while writing A Treatise of Human Nature,[10] he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature."[11] He completed the Treatise at the age of twenty-six."
pretty much the moral equivalent of locking yourself in a room for five years to make the game you envisioned at 18, I'd say
