Gamer began to suspect something was off when his Crusader Kings 3 dog outlived three rulers and celebrated its 150th anniversary

Medieval strategy games teach players that everything dies. Kings are killed on hunts, heirs get poisoned at dinner, and dynasties fall apart over one bad marriage. Occasionally, though, the game produces a character the rules seem not to apply to. It's not an emperor or a saint, but a regular dog.

One Crusader Kings 3 player picked up a dog named ISP through a random event in 1120. The first owner lived to 94 and died in 1173, by which point the pet was already 53. At the funeral, a new ruler inherited the dog, then another after that. The dog is now 150 years old (the screenshot shows 115, but the author said they have played 35 more years since) and serves its fourth owner, with no sign of slowing down. The player admitted to suspecting the dog of secretly running the Roman Empire "looking for a bone or some bullshit."

The first thing commenters brought up was a known bug, where an inherited pet supposedly loses its age check and becomes immortal. It's a neat theory, but the dates don't add up. At 53, the dog was already far past any reasonable limit while still living with the first owner. Something else likely broke, such as an event firing at the exact moment the game should have rolled for death. For comparison, the longest-lived real dog on record was long considered to be Bluey, an Australian cattle dog who lived 29 years.

Paradox Interactive games have produced similar stories before. Stellaris had a comparable case: if an elderly leader went missing in action just as the game was due to check them for death by old age, the check was lost for good. The result was immortal scientists. Another trick turned up later, where players lowered the age cap of councilors until the chance of dying dropped to zero.

The more entertaining part is how players explain the glitch through lore. The most elegant version goes like this:

Your courtiers were changing the dog every 10 years or so

Someone promptly flipped it around: maybe the kingdom changes the king every 10 years so the dog doesn't notice. After that, imagination ran free. ISP was cast as a witch coven familiar, a skinwalker, and even a biblical figure like the mysterious dog from the Book of Tobit. The name caused some confusion of its own. Kerbal Space Program fans saw specific impulse, while viewers of the YouTuber iSorrowProductions thought of the Project Zomboid guide creator.

Kings in Crusader Kings 3 come and go, but the good boy stays.