Hideo Kojima's career is fascinating, and it's not something you can hope to find out about from "The Official Version". You kind of have to dig into old interviews, and have first-hand memories of long-delisted websites and discarded promotional material. GW has erased the ugly details, but I can't say goodbye to yesterday, my friend. Kojima thrived on the sidelines. He was originally hired as a project planner on Konami's MSX team, in the offices that the management didn't pay much attention to. The high-stakes positions were all working on Famicom and arcade games, and Kojima spent the first decade of his career in the shadows, catering to a small, enthusiast market with Japanese home computer releases and text-heavy adventure games. It's easy to over-romanticise this era. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of mismanagement and the expectation for relentless crunch, with many members of staff spending days on end in the office without leaving, but the games that came from those teams were pretty special. They were purposefully constructed, delivering a clear worldview and commenting on the ethical dangers of scientific developments in a politically unstable world. Then MGS1 was a huge international success, and all eyes were on Kojima.

From the early days, it was clear that Kojima had a unique confidence and self-belief. Some may call it ego or even narcissism, but it's what gave him the drive and ambition to attempt blending dense, socially relevant stories with traditional videogame action. When the bulk of the Japanese games industry was still hiding behind publisher-insisted pen names, Kojima opened Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake with an introductory credits sequence, naming each member of staff, saving himself for the biggest credit. It made sense. MSX2 owners who'd played Metal Gear and Snatcher knew that there was a rare quality to Hideo Kojima's games, and Metal Gear 2 was the promise of the Kojimiest game yet. Policenauts would similarly promote itself on the name of its director, delving into the production process with behind the scenes books and bonus discs that were fairly uncommon forms of game merchandise in the mid-90s. Before MGS1 had made the west aware of him, Kojima was putting his face on soundtrack CDs. He wanted the spotlight, but he didn't know how demanding it would be of him.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced, and was propped up as the game for the new millennium. The one thing that would chrysalise the medium into a new form. In tandem with the growing interest in the internet, the significance of home computer ownership was really taking hold. DVD players and digital TV services were selling themselves on "Interactive" features, reportedly blurring the line between audience and participant (we didn't know at the time that the peak of this technology would be Beehive Bedlam). Sony were convinced that Windows PCs were too technical and business-focused for mainstream adoption. There would be no overlap between the computer and the living room. The word at the time was that the PlayStation 2 was going to be the thing to take people into this new, interconnected era, and traditional forms of entertainment would become a memory of the 20th Century. The promise of the "interactive movie" that had been dangled towards early adopters of CD-ROM, finally coming to fruition. From Final Fantasy X to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and perhaps most ridiculously of all, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, many new titles were selling themselves on the promise to bridge the gap between these mediums, but for many, MGS2 seemed like the best bet to accomplish it. That's a lot of pressure for a game where you navigate boxy rooms, avoiding blue vision cones.

Metal Gear Solid 2 trailers were bold. Not only were they promising a game with unforeseen levels of interactivity, but wild narrative swings. We were told Solid Snake was dead. We were told he was the leader of the terrorist organisation putting the world at ransom. We'd anticipated a game that would radically shift our perception of the prior one. When we eventually bought the game, we swallowed the bitter truth when a mysterious Navy SEAL popped up with David Hayter's voice, taking fire at a horny vampire.

Reading pre-release interviews with Kojima, it's clear that he was as convinced by the potential as anyone else. He talks about character movement being impacted by changing wind direction, the integration of voice-recognition and online support. The end results are so compromised that you might not even notice them in the game. The network support got nipped and tucked at so much that in the end, it became an online competition for the opportunity to have your name appear on an in-game dog tag, and a browser-only leaderboard system where you could post your completion stats after you finished. The voice support, adding user-expression to the long, dense CODEC calls? That's the ability to press R2 to have your character audibly think a weird retort. "WHATEVER!" These are the limitations of not only the PlayStation 2 in 2001, but the ability of a Japanese development studio to deliver an action game on new hardware in a three-year project.

MGS2 couldn't live up to those initial ambitions. It didn't fully satisfy those dreaming of something new and transcendent. It was MGS1 again with extra buttons. But oh, what buttons!

MGS2 has so many cool little stealth moves to play around with. You get a real sense of your own ingenuity as you figure your way through each section. VR Missions was everything that MGS1 gameplay could offer. The developers knocked their heads against the walls, spinning its systems off down every conceivable avenue. The frustration of these limitations directly inspired the techniques players could make use of in Sons of Liberty. Players would be able to interact with guards much more intricately, threatening them at gunpoint, disabling walkie-talkies, injuring specific limbs, and shaking them down for extra supplies. Snake and Raiden could roll (or cartwheel), hang from railings, and pop out of cover, ready to fire. Most crucially, you could now aim from a first-person perspective, allowing for much more deliberate action in shoot-outs, or just fuck about with the set dressing to see how many clips KCEJ recorded for the sound of shooting a frying pan with different guns. Shenmue had set a new precedent for how interactive a 3D world could be in a game, and MGS2 picked up the baton to explore how that degree of tangibility could benefit Metal Gear. Hardcore fans who had bought Zone of the Enders solely for the opportunity to play a small section of this game would become intimately familiar with all the quirks and potential of its gameplay, hungry to see how they would be explored in the full campaign. I'm not convinced the Big Shell was the best possible pay-off for these hopes.

It isn't just the fact that players got to spend more time with their favourite muscle man that makes the Tanker section so beloved. It's very purposefully designed to explore MGS2's mechanics, and refreshingly, it borrows little from the structure of the MSX games. Metal Gear had already spent multiple generations reworking and refining the same, familiar setup, and it was exciting to see the series do something different. There's no hostages, no NIKITA puzzle, no underwater facility entrance. It was doing new things, taking out security cameras, shaking down guards for supplies, and sneaking past an audience of a hundred soldiers during a speech. It was exciting. But those old tropes were waiting for us, just around the corner. Justifying themselves via a metatextual reflection upon the previous game.

MGS2 is discussed in hushed, reverential tones these days. If something seemed weird or stupid, you obviously didn't get it. It had been relatively easy to understand a story about genetic inheritance, but memetic inheritance seemed far more abstract. Snake was a son of genetic inheritance, being a clone of the world's most prized soldier, and Raiden, the son of ideological inheritance, with Solidus killing his parents and fostering him as his own brainwashed soldier. Every action he takes is accompanied by a question of how he's being manipulated, and by whom. There's an awkward balance in the game being both radically incisive and incredibly schlocky videogame trash. Whenever it did something too absurd or outright crap, we took faith in the notion that nothing was quite what it seemed. Like there was a hidden truth that would make it all cohesive and brilliant. It was up to us to find it, and if we couldn't figure it out, we could always just pester Kojima and Konami to produce a much more pandering sequel. Full of retcons, underwhelming reveals, and relentless goalpost shifting. Was there ever value in MGS2's outlandish paranormal activity? Did Kojima ever have an answer before his arm was twisted enough to yell "nanomachines" in response to every question? Are we ashamed of our words and deeds for ever thinking the whole of Shell 2 was agonisingly tedious?

Discussing MGS2's story is a sticking your hand in a can of worms and finding a worm-filled rabbit hole at the bottom. A dense, purposefully confusing, and often prescient script. It also has roots in Kojima's 80s action game design, where storybeats are mainly included to intrigue its audience enough to continue playing. Kojima's handwritten script is filled with footnotes, explicitly referencing the Hollywood blockbusters he ripped each idea from. MGS2 was the point where much of Kojima's games became dictated by the promises he'd made in press interviews and pre-release trailers. MGS4 staff have talked about spending months solely working on moments to include in trailers, and then retroactively having to build the game around those moments. That approach started here. Shallow instances of mindblowing spectacle, engineered to shift product with little concern for the long-term impact. Ocelot's arm, Vamp's superhuman abilities, basically everything to do with Dead Cell - they're weird twists, and typically just for the sake of having a weird twist. Vamp's gay relationship with US Marine Corp commander, Scott Dolph, appears to be entirely a sophomoric in-joke targetted at Kojima's then-personal interpreter. MGS2 is simultaneously an earnest musing on the nature of propaganda in the digital age, and a very stupid videogame with absurd arcade game bosses. I don't want to make out like all the silliness is purely problematic or mishandled. There's moments of fun and whimsy I enjoy. Slipping on birdshit and the guard taking a leak off the side of the Strut L. Fatman. It's not the focus, but the old frivolous MSX personality is still here. Just muffled by all the pretension surrounding it. On your first playthrough, you don't know whether you can just enjoy something as a daft joke, or if it's hiding some deeper layer of significance. MGS1 had one foot in gaming's history and another in its future, and MGS2 attempts the same, with messier results in either respect.

The game's English writer, Agness Kaku, has discussed the thankless job of attempting to make MGS2's weird, convoluted script sound engaging through its translation. A lack of reference material, character limits, and heavy rewrites from Konami resulted in the game we have today. It's also clear that she doesn't have much regard for Kojima's script, and attempted to inject it with a richer sense of character and more entertaining dialogue. Many gamers would feel take strong objection to someone, particularly a woman, tinkering with the script from a visionary of Kojima's status, but the bulk of MGS2's most beloved English lines are embellishments on Kaku's part, and her political and literary knowledge lined her up well for the subject matter. However, Konami's insistence on literal translations of certain lines, paired with her personal distaste for Kojima's writing, made the final script fairly patchy and inconsistent. As talented a voice director as Kris Zimmerman is, there are lines of dialogue that are delivered in very odd ways, suggesting the cast didn't really understand the intention behind them. By contrast, Kaku's work on Katamari Damacy presents quite an interesting dynamic. That was a similarly text-rich game, but one with a much more playful tone, and a less demanding writer. She was allowed to completely rewrite the game with very little direction, and the final result was a delight. Katamari writer/director, Keita Takahashi has gone on to learn English at a high level and now lives in San Francisco, where he's expected to speak it as his main language. I wonder if he's ever gone back to look at the English version of his PS2 game.

Metatextually, MGS2 benefits from a constant feeling of distrust. To know whether or not you're seeing the real version. There's an additional distrust of censorship thanks to the game's Q4 2001 release date, the story of terrorists causing destruction and political instability off the coast of New York City, and public sensitivity to the subject matter at the time. Following September 2001, there had been late-stage edits to the game, and as an audience, we can't be sure how compromised the final release is, but even without the real-world parallels, the game is filled with themes of how lies spread and ideas take hold. From the once-tortured child soldier, Raiden, to Peter Stillman's faked disability, to Otacon's disturbing family history, every character in the game has an uneasy relationship with the truth, denying their personal trauma to the world. By the Big Shell portion of the game, there's a question over whether they're real at all, or merely a projection of an elaborate AI construct. Sections of the game that are teased - boss fights with Fortune and Ocelot, as well as the bulk of Shell 2 - go unfulfilled. Raiden breaks through enemy security by lying about his identity, pretending to be one of them, adopting their uniform, and manipulating their body to trick a retinal scanner. Raiden's first quest in the game - disabling a series of explosives - turns out to be an elaborate decoy, while Snake discovers the real bomb off-screen. Snake is playing the real game, and Raiden is still in the VR replica. The Solid Snake game that had been heavily promoted at trade shows and plastered on magazine covers for years beforehand didn't exist. It was all just part of the simulation. This is the dynamic of MGS1 and 2.

The truth of the situation only comes through in the ending.
"It doesn't matter if they were real or not, that's never the point."
"Don't obsess over words so much."
"Everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice..."
Kojima couldn't make something that transcended the medium of videogames. The Emotion Engine was merely a new CPU, comprised of silicon soldered to a circuit board, and shipped to millions of homes within SCE's new electronic toy. When the PS2 became something people could touch and own, the best it could do was play rushed versions of TimeSplitters and SSX that would soon be rendered obsolete by their immediate sequels. The dream was over. The boundaries were brought into stark focus. Metal Gear Solid 2 would be little more than The New Metal Gear Solid, despite the discussion, obsession, interpretation and reinterpretation it would provoke. With the constant focus from fans, it became more than it was. Value was seen in it, and thus, it was there.

Metal Gear Solid 2 changed my relationship with videogames, and not in ways that either its developers, or I, may have hoped. It made me aware of the inherent limitations. Before it, the future of videogames seemed like a boundless, infinite expanse. They could be anything. They could transcend physical limits. They were another dimension. A world of pure imagination. Afterwards, I became aware of just how tethered they were to reality. They were the result of project plans, processing speeds, staff sizes, managerial oversight, limited talent and budgets. They became infinitely smaller. Less significant. Cute. They didn't reflect the limitations of their creators' imaginations, but their ability to deliver a project with realistic expectations. It levelled the playing field. Now, MMOs, which promised entirely new worlds for players to live in, were dragged back to the same context as Pong. It made me realise what a game was. I came to the other side of that, and still loved it. To call it a disappointment is denying the growth that we needed to take. As fans, creators, and an industry. We're currently living through the investor class catching up with PS2 gamers, getting hyped for Final Fantasy XI, kidding on like we're going to spend all our free time in the fucking Metaverse. We all need to accept reality, and learn how to live in it. To appraise videogames with maturity. Let's all calm down and see how big a score we can get on Dig Dug today.

Tears of the Kingdom is an evil video game. It is a shallow, meandering homonuculus in the shape of a "critically acclaimed video game." It is sinister in how it slithers along wearing the skin of a game we all liked seven years ago. It is deceptive in how it tricks the player into thinking it's wealth of "content" is fun. It is manipulative in how it attempts to wring tears out from the player despite the story meaning nothing.

It is a game about nothing for everyone. It is formless sludge to keep your fingers busy and your mind vacant. It is the death of art. It loots the corpses of the good Zelda games and uses them for fuel for the content mill.

It's kinda fun to skydive though

I won't call Tears of the Kingdom the worst game I've ever played - that'd be obviously hyperbolic. It's mechanically sound, looks nice, and there is some meager bits of fun to be had. But I think it's absolutely one of the worst pieces of art I've ever experienced. It does nothing to justify it's own existence, seemingly satisfied with just being. It has nothing new to say, nothing interesting to do, nothing cool to see. But hey, there's 900 Korok seeds, 700 locations, 194 caves, 152 shrines, 120 lightroots, 58 wells, 35 chasms, 35 settlements, 60 side adventures, 31 shrine quests, 139 side quests, 18 memories, it's so awesome dude there's so much content the game is great it has content I like this game because it has content I love content

I understand now why Kojima is so insistent that MGSV isn't actually "5". This is clearly the culmination of the series, the final and total statement after which anything else is just an elaboration on an existing theme. MGS4 is so thoroughly and maddeningly crafted from hundreds of layers of metanarrative, it almost doesn't matter that the actual play you do is only barely present within. All previous Metals Gear Solid were in a sense sequences of set pieces that blended the gap between play and cinema, so it makes sense that this goes hardest of all on the overlap. All the cutscenes are playable, and all the moments of play are just moments between cutscenes.

This isn't a complaint, by any stretch of the imagination. Without any shred of irony, I'll say I consider Kojima an auteur and this game a masterpiece. From the opening, where you flip through FMV channels including David Hayter being fictionally interviewed as David Hayter, it sets out to reproduce, parody, and critique a whole world of information technology and the culture produced by it. And somehow it succeeds! This one relatively short game embeds within itself all the manic violence on the battlefield of thought that the characterizes the 20th century. Even its labyrinthine plot with double-cross atop double-cross serves as a mirror of the care and attention that must be paid to understand the complexities of our own world.

As a cinematic experience, I prefer Metal Gear Solid 3. In terms of raw fun of play, I'll always pick Metal Gear Solid V. But as an art object, it's hard to imagine a game more complete in itself or absurdly competent in its work than Metal Gear Solid 4.

totally understand why this is put on such a pedestal and works for so many people but i really don't think it's for me. the bosses are pretty hit or miss to me, with many of them having solutions i could easily understand, but couldn't easily execute on. the prime example i'd say is the 15th colossus, where you can clearly tell you're supposed to climb up the sides of the arena, and you can clearly tell you're supposed to get it to dislodge rocks you can see in the ceiling, but the game is overly specific about where you need to be to do so, leading to the player kind of just trial and erroring the correct position. it's far from bad boss design, but it makes the limitations of the game very obvious, which is a feeling i had all over SOTC. i assume a lot of people probably played this on the PS3 remaster or on a non-hardware accurate emulator, because woo boy this game has very noticeable performance issues. i normally don't complain about this sort of thing, but drops are constant, sometimes just being the result of moving the camera around. i get the feeling that this wouldn't be considered shippable today. the lighting is also a great idea that gives a lot of emotional weight... but the implementation leads to the player being unable to see where they're going or what they're doing a lot of the time. the atmosphere is still gorgeous, but ico also had gorgeous atmosphere and felt far more complete and considered than this, to me.

MGS4 decimated all the symbols and mannerisms of the franchise, until there was nothing left to enjoy. Phantom Pain exists in a completely irrelevant space, it is a game that has no "story to tell", because all the stories are already established.

More post-modern than MGS2, it serves to prove that Metal Gear never had a "fourth wall" and canonize the player as a in-universe character. We are a phantom that repeats the steps of the legend, but we are the legend. Venom Snake doesn't take more actions than the player would, because he does what Big Boss would do... and the player has already been Big Boss -twice-.

You are Venom, Venom is Big Boss, Big Boss is Snake, Snake was Solid Snake and Raiden. Choose who you want to be today, choose the game you want to play. Let it die but with hope for the future.

fuck it, five stars. not because it's perfect (it certainly isn't), but because in its final hours it totally transcends itself, reaching some towering heights and retroactively improving everything that came before. this is one of the most idiosyncratic, visionary works i've experienced in all my time playing games, absolutely overflowing with ideas (about ideas), the result of someone who evidently did not give a shit about restraint or good sense - an attitude i might as well try to embody in my little review here. this is an impassioned, rousing defense of this medium's artistic worth, inspired, resonant, prophetic, stupid, smart, batshit insane all at once, itself the culmination of its own central thesis; to claw your way through the mud, to overcome yourself, to leave behind a beacon, to engrave in fire "i was here", to affirm yourself and in doing so elevate all others with you. my language is cloudy and more than a little histrionic, no doubt, but how else to discuss this thing but with the shock and awe and breathless grandiosity with which it climaxes with! when faced with that raw impact, it suddenly seems oh so trivial that it's a little uneven, that not all its mechanics are perfectly elaborated on, that some parts lag in comparison to others, that kojima's still not a great dramatist. ultimately, i'd take something this distinctly expressed any day over something that gets closer to whatever my ideal of perfection is. actually, on second thought - imperfection is precisely my ideal of perfection. would you not take a diamond with all its harsh edges over the smoothest, roundest rock?

After replaying Morrowind in full for the first time since I was like 12, I think a couple things have been reaffirmed to me- things I had forgotten in the last decade since I actually played through it from start to "finish". I'm planning on going back to tidy up loose ends and play the expansions once I've gotten through another game or two, but even though I don't know if I'm ever gonna write a complete and comprehensive "review" of Morrowind, I wanna write down the stuff that came to mind while I was playing it:

So firstly, I think I sort of forgot how profoundly this game influenced my taste and defined what I like in video games. There's something about Morrowind's approach to crafting a rich, unfamiliar world and making the player slowly piece together its mysteries that stuck with me, and even now I feel that in some of the games that I've come to love in the past few years- Pathologic, Caves of Qud, Oleander Garden's Hexcraft games (please play Harlequin Fair), and even Kenshi (which I'm playing now specifically because I'd heard it took heavy inspiration from Morrowind and I wanted to see how it felt diving straight into after finishing this) all hit this note for me, and I think that it's this part of Morrowind that sticks out to people most. Its world is imaginative and alienating, extremely detailed and storied, and you're arriving to it as an outsider. Everything is overwhelming when you first step in, and there are mysteries to be solved both in terms of the history of this world and the mechanics that will help you survive it. When people talk about Morrowind, this is what they remember- that sense of scope that actually drives the player to read the in-game literature and mess around with its mechanics until they feel at home in its swamps and deserts of ash.

That said: oh my God does the ever-present combat make exploring that beautiful and alien world a chore, and in a world that's as genuinely vast as this anything that's going to deter you from exploring it feels like a huge flaw. For a game that's remembered for and finds its identity- at least retroactively in 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓘𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓗𝓸𝓫𝓫𝔂- in its harsh and unforgiving world and the joys of conquering it, it's kind of sad how much of the game is turned into a trivial but time-consuming annoyance once you realize that the primary obstacle to overcome is its combat. It's absolutely everywhere- the game is silly with things to stab, and doing so becomes as dull as unflavored oatmeal once you have a large enough health pool and offensive skills to basically steamroll everything in your path. And yet, it still takes just enough time and effort to kill things that it doesn't stop being a thing you have to account for while adventuring. I've heard a lot of people talk about how rewarding it is to get strong enough and understand its systems enough to solve the puzzle of how to get infinite stamina, craft artifacts and spells that let you run with infinite speed across its terrain and fly over mountains, and become permanently invisible to enemies while still retaining the ability to chop them to death as they repeatedly scream their race's possible surrender barks. And that's true! All of that is rewarding, but it's mostly for the reason that it lets you bypass the parts of the game where you have to kill your 8 hundredth cliff racer or Dremora Lord or smuggler who begins a fight by screaming "It's about time... I HAVE SOME FUN!" before dying in two hits. Morrowind's terrain and world is lush with ancient ruins and mysterious caves, and your reward for delving into them is the most boring swordplay in the world. Fighting a woman whose body is made of gold in an ancient place of forbidden worship somehow manages to become rote and routine. Vvardenfell stops feeling threatening. If I'm placed in an unfamiliar situation I can be confident that I have something in my spell list or some weapon in my inventory that can totally nullify whatever's waiting for me.

And I think the most tragic part of this is that the combat kinda needs to be there- not even just from a gameplay perspective, but from a thematic one. The world of Morrowind is a violent and hostile and alien place, one where the wildlife really will rip you apart, one where there are incredibly powerful Slavery Wizards who have dedicated their lives to insane quests for power- one where a volcano at the very center of the world spews a disease that twists people's flesh and drives them to murder. The game has humor and triumph and comfortable, cozy locales outside the wilderness, but even then it's hard to shake the darker, more threatening elements of Vvardenfell. The world of Morrowind needs to be filled with danger to feel real, and it's a shame to me that the danger present in it becomes nullified way too early and way too easily, especially if you already have a knowledge of the game's systems. That, to me, is its biggest shortcoming.

And yet, in spite of that, I really, really cannot bring myself to not love Morrowind. For all my problems with it, there's so much passion here, so much effort to make a world that's not just expansive and has a complex history, but that's genuinely beautiful to behold. I sometimes wondered why this game always looks so much less appealing to me with community-made patches that add more realistic textures, with mods that dramatically change the lighting or saturate the colors to make the game more "vibrant", and like, after my most recent playthrough I think I put my finger on it. Morrowind's world is designed to feel ancient and alien, and its color palette reflects that- the title screen is clearly trying to evoke an ancient, weathered parchment; the skill icons look like eons-old folk art, simple and abstract. Most of the brightest colors are reserved for UI elements that need to stand out like the Health, Magicka and Stamina bars, while the actual world tends to use more muted colors. The simplicity of the textures, the murkiness of a lot of the game's visuals- I genuinely feel like these things slap so fucking hard. I'm definitely far from the first person to notice this, too. If you're looking for a genuinely excellent visual mod, I need to recommend Morrowind Watercolored v2. The mod is excellent and has a complete understanding of the appeal of Morrowind's visuals- all the textures are based off the originals and none of them try to add extra detail; instead, it makes some subtle changes to make the game's textures appear even more like a moving painting in a way that you really won't even notice unless you're looking for it. Morrowind is not meant to be a place you could potentially inhabit. You are stepping into a dark fantasy world that's long been lost.

There's also a very real sense that this game was made by humans in a way I don't get out of Oblivion or Skyrim. The fingerprints of Morrowind's developers and designers are left all over the world- in the imaginative writing and lore, in the fact that some of the most powerful enchanted items in the game were made to commemorate forum users who died during the development of the game whose ashes you can find, and even in the extremely self-indulgent multi-part quest where you can enter a loving and passionate friends with benefits arrangement with a Khajiit thief. Morrowind is an extremely flawed game that also is absolutely teeming with soul- it feels like the sort of game that would be way, way rarer in the AAA space today. In Morrowind every Easter Egg is a reference to some forum poster or in-joke or an environmental designer's favorite Monty Python sketch; in Skyrim you climb to the top of the world to find a tribute to Notch Minecraft, serving as a subtle assurance that, even if Bethesda's legal department had a problem with him, Skyrim's developers certainly don't :) It's hard to put into words, but I get the impression Morrowind was made by individuals who cared and had ideas in a way a game like it simply wouldn't today.

Final note: the main quest's approach to prophecy and myth and how it's used to shape the narratives and attitudes of entire cultures is really cool. Surprisingly clever and more well thought-through than I noticed as a tot.