Or: what happened to Bethesda Softworks? A mystery adventure!
When I was eleven or twelve, my best friend who still plays paintball and Left 4 Dead with me installed a DOS game on my aging 486 because—get this, dude—it has literally thousands of towns and dungeons and shit. My first experience playing Daggerfall almost resulted in a glorious Fatality as dozens of quarts of blood fled my loins and shot straight into my cerebral cortex, or whichever part of the brain it is in sullen preteen boys who are really too intelligent to like Isaac Asmiov as much as their parents that’s responsible for really, truly believing that they’d like more than anything in the world to live in Middle Earth.
I am paralyzed by this game's ineffable charm.
Mostly this was because the first dungeon is so labyrinthine and confusing: a big mess of practically unmappable 3D space, it looks like two octopi mating from a bird’s-eye view, and represents a gleeful disregard of 2D norms and an ecstatic, if haphazard, exploration and exploitation of space that characterizes a lot of early 3D games, from Tomb Raider to Warhawk. No tutorial popups here, and many a Daggerfall neophyte has quit the game in frustration, never to return—defeated by the legendary Privateer’s Hold. What’s more fantastic? There really are thousands (or maybe just hundreds, or just a couple hundred, though who am I to count?) of towns and dungeons and shit, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable, aside from the three big capital cities of the game’s twenty or so provinces. And more fantastic than that? Every dungeon is more mind-bogglingly complex than the first—and each is unique, though you’d never be able to tell.