General:Elderscrolls.com Archive/Most Memorable Elder Scrolls Moments

Most Memorable Elder Scrolls Moments
(link)
Medium/Format	Online Interview
Date	April 26, 2004
Interviewee(s)	Todd Howard Ken Rolston Ashley Cheng Matt Picioccio Gary Noonan Mike Lipari Hugh Riley Emil Pagliarulo Steve Meister Gavin Carter Mark Nelson Pete Hines
Interviewer(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Hosted By	elderscrolls.com/codex

Todd Howard, Executive Producer

It's so hard to pick just a few moments for me in the history of this series. I started at Bethesda right as Arena came out, and when I first played it I was thinking -- sweet -- this is a really nice dungeon-hack game. The game starts you in a dungeon where you spend your first few levels. And then I got out into the wilderness and I was like, "You have to be kidding me. I can go anywhere? Do anything? This. Rules." My first instinct was to run around killing everyone (something that I've noticed new players still doing to this day in any game). I came across a river, walked along it, found a boat, sailed it to a small island where I found a crypt, went in, killed skeletons, and found a great magic item. It was that single small experience that hooked me.

I had the pleasure of working on the CD version of Arena, and having to test all the way through the game, the "Passwall" spell became my best friend. I still don't know how anyone could have solved all those dungeon riddles without a hintbook.

In Daggerfall, the one thing I remember was this cutscene for when you could have sex with people you met. It eventually got axed and I still have the original art for it in a cabinet here. It was tastefully done of course.

One of the most fun things for us during Battlespire was to play multiplayer and just sit in the chat lobby before the game started. The chat lobby showed you the character faces of the other people while you chatted and any changes another player made to their face. One night we just sat there in the lobby playing "create the guy who looks most like David Hasslehoff".

Redguard was a lively project and our lead programmer loved to mess with me. I kept sending him bug reports for my scripts and he would build a new version of the game quickly that fixed them. One day he sent me a new build that seemed to work, but he had coded all the buildings to hop up-and-down after a few minutes. I called him back -- "very funny." He laughed and made a new build. This one worked fine and no hopping buildings -- but after 5 minutes they all started spinning around.

Another Redguard moment was before E3 1997. We were up all-night and starting to feel the effects of little sleep and had been listening to this Tom Jones CD to keep us alert. The next thing you know our lead artist had a 3D Tom Jones model and we threw him in the game. Our E3 demo ended with Cyrus in the palace and Tom Jones comes out belting "It's Not Unusual".

With Morrowind, there are two moments. One was E3 2001 when we first showed it off to a large number of people. It was fantastic to finally be able to show all our hard work and the reception to it was incredible. People stayed and watched the demo over and over, some up to two hours. The other is the community for Morrowind plug-ins and mods. To this day I'm still amazed at how it's grown and what kind of new life people have been able to breathe into the game. I'm so happy we released the Construction Set. Not everyone uses it by a long shot, but The Elder Scrolls experience would not be the same without it.

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Ken Rolston, Lead Designer

Arena

I looked at the exposed boobs on the cover and said, "Phew. This is gonna be a stinker." Over the years I've probably started Arena 20 times. Each time I had to relearn the arcane secrets of DOS memory management. Each time I loved the creaking doors, squeaking rats, and long swims in flooded tunnels. Only ONE time did I make it out of the first dungeon and wander around chattering with folks. And each time I abandoned the game, satisfied, and moved on to the next Flavor-of-the-Month.

In my declining years [NO, Mark, not quite yet], I can look forward to actually playing through Arena.

Daggerfall

I loved finding a bear in a closet in my very first dungeon. I loved wandering around COMPLETELY lost in the dungeon 3-D mazes -- my favorite part of the game, though maddening. And I loved getting mail from a Post Zombie.

And I loved it when I found out I could jump on top of bats rising up the elevator shafts and ride around on top of them. 'Bat Riders of Daggerfall! Hooray!'

Battlespire

I did the voices of the scamps. "Keys? Keys in dark, NASTY place. Near my tail. Want look? See?" I loved them to pieces.

I truly loved level 5, the Chimera of Desolation, an island floating in the oceans of Oblivion. At the time, that was the first time I'd seen a exterior location worth exploring in a computer game. It set the standard for what I wanted to see in future CRPGs.

And, by the way, I'm the guy who stuck the scamp there that follows you around everywhere, admiring your thighs.

Redguard

I HATED that stupid mushroom jumping puzzle. I never finished the game. I played through every other section and enjoyed it, but on the final day of pre-Gold playtest, I hit the mushroom jumping puzzle, turned off the machine, and never looked at Redguard again. [Now, when I WISH I could play it again, I can't. I HATE being robbed of my gaming heritage by obsolete technology.]

Morrowind

It's still my favorite CRPG, and heaven knows, I've sucked the juice out of it.

My favorite activity is whacking monsters and running around, training them behind me, until I have a huge, clamorous parade of enemies. Then I run into town and watch the guards go nuts trying to kill them all.

I am also an obsessive mountain climber. I have pioneered many routes traveling cross-country through terrain I know I shouldn't be able to walk over.

Favorite moment? While playtesting, I suddenly noticed the flowers, and went around for about an hour, looking at all the pretty blooms and their components they yielded. It seemed as natural an activity as smelling the first rose of the Spring.

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Ashley Cheng, Producer

Of all the games we've ever made at Bethesda, Redguard is definitely my favorite. Redguard was a great action-adventure game with interesting characters, great dialogue and challenging puzzles. Back then, I was working as the PR guy at Bethesda. I remember going on a press tour with Todd Howard, Redguard's project lead. We had just gotten the game working with 3DFX cards and it looked amazingly good, especially the Observatory. Jaws dropped everytime we showed the Observatory's spinning planets with the gorgeous 3DFX lighting.

Michael Mack's performance as Cyrus is easily among the best game voice performances I've ever heard. We still use him as the voice of the Redguards in Morrowind. My favorite taunt from Morrowind actually came from Redguard -- I'll be back and you'll be dead!

My favorite part of Redguard is the town square with the Draggin' Tale Inn, the Mages Guild, the temple and bookshop and the secret smuggler's door. I liked traveling around the town, the freedom of exploring each building. N'Gasta is probably my favorite character in the game. I loved how his island was basically one big cemetery with lots of great fighting.

The music in Redguard was great, too. I still like to use some of Redguard's music as temp tracks for projects I'm working on.

Back then, we would do all the packaging here in our offices in our warehouse. When Redguard finally went gold, the entire company all went down to the warehouse to start stuffing boxes so we could make our initial order. I don't remember how many boxes we built that day but we were down there well into the night. Redguard came with this cool map. But to add flavor, we decided to burn the maps. We took a torch, went outside and burned the edges off a batch of maps. They came out really, really well. Not every box got a burned map, but hopefully, if you bought Redguard, you got one of them.

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Matt Picioccio, Programmer

When I turned 14 years old, my parents got a new PC. I already had an Apple ][, and I played games on it all the time, including RPGs. Shortly thereafter, my parents got me my first issue of any gaming magazine ever -- the December 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World, with The Elder Scrolls: Arena on the cover. I poured over Scorpia's article for months -- I had never seen a game this cool before. When the game finally came out, I picked it up immediately, and it was everything I had hoped. My love for RPGs, especially computer RPGs, started with that December 1993 issue of CGW.

My second favorite moment came up during the development of Morrowind. As the programmer responsible for the sky and weather, I was the first person to see it rain on Vvardenfell. Watching the clouds come in, the colors darken, and the rain start up -- the combination of awe at what I was working on and professional pride in my work made that moment very special for me.

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Gary Noonan, Artist

I had just bought my first REAL home PC, and the first game I bought for it was Arena. I was sucked in for the few few days AND nights, skipping many of my classes and even work, just to play it. The paper doll aspect blew me away. I had to have the coolest gear known to man, and that was my ultimate mission in the game. One quest in particular I remember was having to go kill a troll for someone. The dungeon was a huge, crawling maze filled with some sort of flaming dog-like beast, and the troll was a nasty somebody to beat. My friends used to come over my house just to sit and watch me play cause they thought the game was amazing (let's face it, po' kids simply didn't have computers and cool games back in the day). Little did I know then, but the company that made that game that stole much of my life back then, would come to hire me 2 years later!

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Mike Lipari, Programmer

Deadliest Creature: Giant Spiders in Arena. When bitten by a spider you were paralyzed. When you were paralyzed in water you died. This combined with the fact that many dungeons contained a surplus of both water and spiders meant that even a high level character had to keep a close eye on their surroundings while adventuring.

Most Powerful Spell: Passwall in Arena. Having problems getting past some bad guys in one section of a dungeon? Continually getting lost in a maze? Unable to figure out the riddle on a door? No problem. Join the mages guild and do some leveling up until you can cast a Passwall spell, then remake the dungeon as you desire removing any offending walls from your path. Sure some of the later dungeons had 'special' walls you couldn't Passwall through (likely out of sheer frustration on the designers' part), but nothing beat the kick you got the first time you cast a spell and altered the geography of the dungeon.

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Hugh Riley, Artist

Using the torch on Maria [sic].

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Emil Pagliarulo, Designer

I've been an Elder Scrolls fan since Arena, and in fact my college roommate and I were addicted to both Arena and Daggerfall. It's really easy for me to remember my favorite Elder Scrolls moment, because it really was one of the most memorable, significant gaming moments I've ever had. I had just installed Arena, and started up a new game. After wandering around the initial dungeon for awhile, I made it to the surface. That's when I just sat there in awe, not really sure what I was seeing was even possible. My roommate and girlfriend at the time (now my wife) were there with me, and they were equally amazed. There was my character, in a living, breathing city. A gentle snow was falling, people were milling about, that great MIDI music was playing...and the three of us were just teleported to this whole other world.

There are other memorable moments, of course. In Arena, I cruised around dungeons using the "Passwall" spell, which would actually destroy sections of wall and allow you to pass through them (you could essentially tunnel through nearly an entire dungeon...which, as Todd Howard has pointed out to me, was an absolute nightmare for the designers back then!). When Daggerfall came out, my trusty roommate (Brian Ciampa) and I spend about a half hour on the phone with Bethesda tech support, trying to get help with the HIMEM setting in the config.sys file to cut down on the load times when entering dungeons!

Okay, and to be completely honest, the one other really significant Elder Scrolls moment came on the day I first started working here at Bethesda. That was the realization of one of my dreams -- to go from Elder Scrolls gamer to Elder scrolls game designer. I can only hope that in the future I'll work with a new designer here at Bethesda who had the same experience I had -- this time, playing the stuff I helped design.

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Steve Meister, Programmer

Favorite moments developing Morrowind:

Summon Baldness: When working on the Summon Enchanted Helm spell, I tested an incomplete version of the code. When I cast the spell, my character became bald for the duration of the spell. Should have left that one in as an Easter Egg.

My loved-fayrbol with radius of 2km dies everyone: I discovered a Russian Morrowind fan site (http://www.travel.ag.ru/tes/) had quoted me -- in amongst the Cyrillic, I found my name in an article. That was pretty cool in and of itself, but the Babelfish translation was even better. :) Discovering the international Elder Scrolls community was an amazing experience. The Morrowind fan community all over the world is just incredible and I feel privileged to be a part of it.

Gone Gold! The feeling of relief was amazing. It's DONE! But then the tension of waiting for the game to get into gamers' hands -- will they like it? Will they hate it? What will the press say? Their positive reaction, and finally seeing that brown box up on store shelves was the most gratifying experience in my 24 years of programming.

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Gavin Carter, Associate Producer

My favorite Daggerfall moment happened shortly after the game was released. I was the ripe old age of 16, and had taken to playing the game long into the night whenever I could. One night around three in the morning, I was returning to town to pick up some supplies after a long run of witch coven scouring. It was a particularly stormy night in the game, and I was totally immersed in the ambience. At the time, I was using a monster pair of speakers for my computer. They could really pump out the volume, but were also very unreliable, occasionally cutting out for no apparent reason. This time, they cut out right as I was entering Daggerfall city. I sighed and took to fiddling with the volume knob. First I only got static. Then the speakers made a popping noise and I could hear the game music once again, though very faintly. I turned the volume all the way up, but the sound was still very faint and hissing. Frustrated, I was forced to stand up in my chair and lean against the desk while reaching around to check the connection. As I put my ear directly against the speaker, I felt the connector pop back into place, and the sound came back - at full volume. What's the first thing I hear? "VEEEEENNNNNNNGEAAAANCE!!!!!!!!" The shock of King Lysandus' exclamation sent me falling backwards out of the chair, and awoke my less-than-pleased parents, who forced me to invest in a pair of headphones the next day.

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Mark Nelson, Designer

In the design of Morrowind and its expansions, a lot of design meetings turned into heated discussions, often about topics that might seem out of place in a normal work environment. My favorite moment occurred the evening after one particularly heated day-long discussion over werewolves, specifically about how high they should jump. Todd and I argued the point for hours -- during the meeting, passing in the hall, while ordering lunch, etc. As any real RPG fan knows, werewolves can jump high -- really high -- but it was taking a lot to convince Todd to see the obvious error in his thinking. He has all these issues about things that "break the game" or "make the game unplayable." Whatever.

The argument went all day without resolution, and by the time I got home, I was beat. My wife and I went out to dinner, and she naturally asked me how my day went. Bad idea. I tried to explain to her about the day as I got more and more fired up, finally saying, "So this stupid werewolf meeting ended up lasting all day, and I don't understand why Todd doesn't get that werewolves should jump really high!" Of course, at first I didn't see the waitress standing behind me, or the completely puzzled look on her face. Priceless. I suppose not everyone has meetings about werewolves, but we do. Thinking about that, it makes me remember what an odd, and often amusing, job I have.

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Pete Hines, Marketing Director

For me, nothing beats the moment in Morrowind when you first step up onto the deck of the ship and get a chance to fully appreciate the world you're about to experience. It is, as Todd and I like to call it, a "money shot." Big silt strider off to your right, really realistic water all around you sparkling in the sun, vast wilderness this way, the first town you'll visit over here, some kind of tower over there...I love that moment.

Given how long it was between the release of Daggerfall and the release of Morrowind, we felt we had a lot to prove. Stepping out into that scene is just a great, "we're back" moment. Before the game shipped it was great to show the game to the press and have them see that shot and experience that moment for the first time and say, "Whoa!" or something more profane but equally complimentary.

Which brings me to my favorite non-gaming moment. When we showed Morrowind at E3 for the first time several years ago we got a really good response from the press that got to see the game, including my all-time favorite from the guys at Penny Arcade. I was reading their daily blurb and it mentioned going by our booth and seeing Morrowind and their summary started with the following phrase, "Bethesda Softworks is definitely not [censored] around." If I wish I could have put the uncensored version of that quote on in our ads and on the box.