When I first played it, Oblivion was such a touching, fleeting experience. I played it on my best friend's couch. I played it in a cold basement. I used to be afraid to go down there. I couldn't believe what this game was.
At home my main game was Kingdom Hearts. I had a PS2. I was used to the hallway design of those games. If you go back and play your PS2, and then immediately boot up Oblivion, you can get a sense of what that did to me.
We lived through the 5th, 6th, and 7th console generations. Its impossible to understand how exciting those times were unless you were there. We saw a lot happen with computer graphics. Sometimes you can find in hours long YouTube videos some historical analysis, some cultural critique of that time. You can find people explaining how it was to see generational leaps in what computers could do occurring around you as a child. These guys are trying to make sense of their memories in the best way they know how. It was a lot more than computer graphics.
I lived in a village at that time. The end of my childhood coincided with the beginning of the internet age. For some reason it sounds so trite to recount all this. But we didn't have cell phones then. In general, we weren't connected. I did not know that big cities existed. Truthfully I didn't know anything about the world. In the winter there, it froze. We had something like eight months of winter, depending on the year. It might snow as early as October, and snow might stay on the ground all the way through May. It snowed on the fourth of July one year.
There was this winter festival. You had to wear thermal underwear and snowpants and boots and all this gear just to be outside. And, essentially everyone in this village came to stand around a bonfire built near a historic marker in the town. I remember how cold the wind was on my face. Your face would be roasted from the heat of the fire and still feel cold. I looked up at the stars then. I was part of a town.
I think that was the last breath of pre internet humanity.
These machines exploded into this reality. And it wasn't just the consoles. The home computer got better. My friends got wifi. And the world really started to feel like it was changing. This was the aero frutiger era. You couldn't believe what the machines could do now. It all felt so real.
In that milieu I played Oblivion for the first time. That set the pattern for everything that I would think about video games for the rest of my life. There was a world inside that game. And you didn't know how far it went. I spent most of the time I played it just walking around. I spent a lot more time thinking about the game than I did playing it. I probably spent more time reading the manual than I did playing the game. The game wouldn't run on my computer at home, so the main chance that I had to play it was when I went over to my friends house.
Oblivion was incredible for its time. I remember walking out of the imperial sewers for the first time and being enchanted by the Ayleid ruins. I was so impressed by the skillbuilding system. It impacted me in the same way that legends and stories impact people. The scenery of that game was so similar to where I lived that it didn't feel "otherworldly", exactly. I knew forests and meadows and snow covered hills. It was easy for me to imagine myself there. My childhood games took on the format of Oblivion; I would practice skills and say that I achieved journeyman rank.
In some ways all Oblivion does is speak to the evergreen appeal of Dungeons and Dragons. We all made up imaginary stories of adventure. But what felt great about this game at that time, was that it gave those imaginary things form in a way that I'd never seen before. I'm sure that many people have a similar experience with their first RPG.
At home my main game was Kingdom Hearts. I had a PS2. I was used to the hallway design of those games. If you go back and play your PS2, and then immediately boot up Oblivion, you can get a sense of what that did to me.
We lived through the 5th, 6th, and 7th console generations. Its impossible to understand how exciting those times were unless you were there. We saw a lot happen with computer graphics. Sometimes you can find in hours long YouTube videos some historical analysis, some cultural critique of that time. You can find people explaining how it was to see generational leaps in what computers could do occurring around you as a child. These guys are trying to make sense of their memories in the best way they know how. It was a lot more than computer graphics.
I lived in a village at that time. The end of my childhood coincided with the beginning of the internet age. For some reason it sounds so trite to recount all this. But we didn't have cell phones then. In general, we weren't connected. I did not know that big cities existed. Truthfully I didn't know anything about the world. In the winter there, it froze. We had something like eight months of winter, depending on the year. It might snow as early as October, and snow might stay on the ground all the way through May. It snowed on the fourth of July one year.
There was this winter festival. You had to wear thermal underwear and snowpants and boots and all this gear just to be outside. And, essentially everyone in this village came to stand around a bonfire built near a historic marker in the town. I remember how cold the wind was on my face. Your face would be roasted from the heat of the fire and still feel cold. I looked up at the stars then. I was part of a town.
I think that was the last breath of pre internet humanity.
These machines exploded into this reality. And it wasn't just the consoles. The home computer got better. My friends got wifi. And the world really started to feel like it was changing. This was the aero frutiger era. You couldn't believe what the machines could do now. It all felt so real.
In that milieu I played Oblivion for the first time. That set the pattern for everything that I would think about video games for the rest of my life. There was a world inside that game. And you didn't know how far it went. I spent most of the time I played it just walking around. I spent a lot more time thinking about the game than I did playing it. I probably spent more time reading the manual than I did playing the game. The game wouldn't run on my computer at home, so the main chance that I had to play it was when I went over to my friends house.
Oblivion was incredible for its time. I remember walking out of the imperial sewers for the first time and being enchanted by the Ayleid ruins. I was so impressed by the skillbuilding system. It impacted me in the same way that legends and stories impact people. The scenery of that game was so similar to where I lived that it didn't feel "otherworldly", exactly. I knew forests and meadows and snow covered hills. It was easy for me to imagine myself there. My childhood games took on the format of Oblivion; I would practice skills and say that I achieved journeyman rank.
In some ways all Oblivion does is speak to the evergreen appeal of Dungeons and Dragons. We all made up imaginary stories of adventure. But what felt great about this game at that time, was that it gave those imaginary things form in a way that I'd never seen before. I'm sure that many people have a similar experience with their first RPG.