I remember being so excited to review The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the Xbox (I didn’t have a decent gaming PC at the time) that I bought a copy of the game as soon as the shop I was working at got it, not knowing my request for a review copy from Bethesda had gone through or that I could have gotten the game cheaper with my employee discount. Of course, I ended up with two copies of the game, one of which I gave to a friend who was new to RPGs and wanted “something really good” to try out. At the time, nearly everything about the game thrilled me, from the lovely water effects, the sheer size of the game world, the fact that monsters could chase you into towns (where you could have thee guards dispatch them, provided they didn’t all die in the process) and so forth and so on…

I recall being about three days (and nine pages of notes) into the game when I got a call from him saying he was absolutely hooked, but overwhelmed at the game’s scope and the “hell of a lot of books” that laid out all sorts of helpful lore and occasionally rewarded reading them with stat boosts. He stopped playing soon afterward, and every time I spoke to him after that, he kept saying he’d get back into the game at some point. By then, I’d noted some of the game’s not so hot points (none of which unglued me from the controller for too long) and with a tiny bit of help from the strategy guide I got (still one of the thickest and most outrageously over-written in a good way tomes I’ve read), I was able to turn in a review that I liked, even though I had to chop it down significantly before it was published.

Anyway, I lost touch with my friend when he went out west to get married and as time went by (and more games got played on this end on pretty much every console or handheld), I basically forgot all about him and his unfinished TES III antics. Amusingly enough, a few weeks back I ran into another friend who’s in contact with the guy and after exchanging hellos and talking about where life has dropped us and such, he mentions that he did indeed finally get back into Morrowind about three years ago, having kept his original Xbox around just to play the game. I understand he replaced the standard edition I gave him with the Game of the Year version because it had more content and fixed a pesky bug in the original game and he more or less spent every free moment he wasn’t working or taking care of family life dialed into exploring every bit of territory. I was floored because I made it through the main story after some time, but never completed the expansion content, instead moving on to Oblivion when it launched for the Xbox 360 and later, the PS3. While I was amazed at his commitment, I noted that at the rate he was playing, he’s finally get to Skyrim around 2017 or so. Granted, there’s always going to be someone NEW to The Elder Scrolls series as the years roll onward, which should make Bethesda pretty happy at the end of the day.

So yeah, Happy Birthday, Morrowind! Now, what would make me (and a lot of others) happier? Getting a dedicated team together (how about some of those PC modders who have some pretty awesome skills?) to help fix everything wrong with the console versions of Skyrim in time for the inevitable Game of the Year version of that mega-hit. I managed to complete the game, but it wasn’t pretty by the endgame, despite a lot more uninstall/reinstall/cache clearing than I’d care to do again in any other game, grrr…