The more things change... (Patreon)

For the past week or so, I've been on a web archeology binge. 

One of my big aims with the Imperial Library, and with my whole involvement in the lore community, is to preserve not only the facts of lore ("Cyrodiil is the Imperial Province at the center of Tamriel) but also the history of those facts ("Cyrodiil, as a name, did not appear until TESA:Redguard") and the conditions that brought them about ("Battlespire and Redguard was the start of a new set of Bethesda developers, who largely overhauled the universe"). Just as it is vital to specify the era of Tamriel when we make assertions about how things are, it is also important to note what era of Earth those facts arose in. Something as seemingly simple as Redguard naming customs are completely different between Elder Scrolls Online and TES3, for example, and what is seemingly a retcon or contradiction can just as simply be a case of one developer not knowing about what another one wrote. The historography of Tamriel is just as important as its history, if you will.

While TIL focuses specifically on the lore of the Elder Scrolls, lore is just a small part of the greater study of the franchise. To document all of the rest of it, I spun up The Elder Scrolls Archive (tesarchive.wordpress.com) in 2017. Since then, I've slowly been adding all manner of previews, interviews, official posts, and other Elder Scrolls related media to it, all backdated to reflect the original date of publication. Want to know what the original announcement for Morrowind looked like? TESArchive has you covered. 

Earlier this week, though, I went one step deeper. While collecting materials to upload to TESArchive, I stumbled upon a goldmine: google groups has preserved all manner of original usenet newsgroups, dating all the way back to the early 90s. Here were not just official filtered reviews from gaming magazines, but real people posting their real opinions, preserved in situ for us to read 25 years later. 

Some are little nuggets of developer interaction, where now-famous names like Todd Howard and Pete Hines hang out with regular users to ask them about their favorite dialog systems or to announce the release of some new screenshots. Some of them are funny in hindsight, like this one I shared last night on Twitter, where Arena/Daggerfall beta tester Mary Jo DiBella (after whom the goddess Dibella is named) voices a popular concern: can Bethesda, traditionally known known for sports games, succeed at making an RPG after the departure of Julian LeFay? We now know the answer is yes. 

Many, though, read like they could have been written yesterday about Fallout 76 or in 2011 about Skyrim, not in 1994 about Arena. 

Arena is a great game, in spite of the bugs.  I love the extensive
volume of the 'world.'  One could literally spend months just
exploring what there is out there.  In fact, I advise new players to
explore as much as possible before starting the main quest...Once
started, the main quest is too tempting to spend time just wandering
around!  — Dave Read 6/11/94 

What a lame excuse to cover up the MASSIVE amounts of bugs in this
game.  There are more bugs in this game than I have EVER seen in any
retail game.  — Scratchy 9/24/96

 Why do RPG"s well.. suck lately?  — FriendlyGuy 8/2/99

There's something intensely comforting about it. Where in 1997 people were complaining about Battlespire's graphics being bad because they only had 4-sided sprites, or were worrying that they wouldn't be able to play Morrowind if they didn't upgrade to an Nvida GeForce 2, today we're complaining about assets poping in from LODs and wondering if Starfield is waiting on the next-gen consoles. And, as always, the bugs. 

The more things change the more they stay the same. 

I am not yet sure of how I want to best present the dozens of interesting things I've found in my digital digs. A series of articles? A book? A bunch of screenshots? I am certain I want to get it out there, though, so that more people can gain an understanding of, and appreciation for, all the many steps that brought us here.