I was 12 in 2006, which puts me firmly in the target audience for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but I was too busy chatting on internet forums and playing Battlefield 2. I wasn’t as clued into games as a 12-year-old as I am now, and apparently it just passed me by.
Somewhere I have a foggy memory of the CD-Rom case for Oblivion, but it sure wasn’t in my house. Sometimes I regret not playing it when I was younger, because I loved fantasy books, and I still think those are things best enjoyed when you’re young enough for your imagination to really run riot. Better late than never, I suppose. Here, I’ll give you some more cash for a game I might never play, Bethesda.
A Long-Reaching Legacy
It wasn’t until much later in life that I started to see the Oblivion NPC memes and began to wonder why everyone loved this game so much. Was it nostalgia? Or was Oblivion really one of those all-time classics? As it remained a presence in a gaming culture I became more involved with, I discovered more about the game. Fast-forward to 2025, and I have a very distinct image of what Oblivion is without playing a single second of it.
I’ve heard all about its faction system and complicated NPCs – even if they hilariously bug out sometimes, though this is considered a bit of a feature these days – and I wonder if this sort of stuff is going to stand out to me, considering all the modern games I’ve played since 2006. I’m particularly intrigued by the Dark Brotherhood, because everyone has always told me the Dark Brotherhood quest in Oblivion is one of the best quests in gaming ever. Is it, though? Like really?
Oblivion is an old Bethesda game, with all the bugs, silliness, and charm of ‘00s RPGs. Will I appreciate the remaster as much as someone who first played it back then, starry-eyed and wowed by the immersive world-building? Or will I just see it for what it is, an aged game that I missed the first time around? I’ve got a feeling that Oblivion is going to make me feel very cosy. Can you feel nostalgia for something that hasn’t even happened to you? Is there a word for it?
(neologism, uncommon) Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
Bethesda Curse
Never mind Oblivion, I didn’t even play more than ten hours of Skyrim. I get too in my head about Bethesda games. If I can’t play them immediately at launch, I usually won’t bother picking them up later either. That initial hype has to carry me through. The hype allowed me to play around 60 hours of Starfield before I gave up. There was absolutely no chance I’d have played as much of Starfield if everyone around me wasn’t talking about it.
I didn’t play Fallout 3 because I was late to the game, and by the time I got around to playing it I’d already read about all the key story beats online—mostly by accident. So I walked out of the Vault, looked at the map, and thought, “Eh” and turned it off. I wasn’t there when everyone was talking about the things they’d discovered at the time: I was too busy playing Call of Duty, like a normie loser.
Bizarrely, despite all the memes, I have absolutely no clue what Oblivion is about or what even happens in it. Somehow, for over 20 years of spending most of my life on the internet, I have remained pretty much entirely spoiler-free for supposedly one of the greatest RPGs ever made. That in itself has me hyped to play the remaster. I love the idea of speaking to one of my colleagues or friends about something they first experienced in a different time. It has a sort of charm to it that makes me want to play Oblivion even more.
I just took the Xbox downstairs to the big telly, so my flatmates could play it with me. We’ve got a few nights set aside to dive into it. I’m ready for the game to take me back to a much simpler time. Even though I’m 30, I’ll still get up nice and early before everyone else is awake and play Oblivion in the quiet hours of the morning, as the lord himself, Todd Howard, intended.