Oblivion: Somehow, 17 years have passed since The Elder Scrolls went mainstream and changed gaming forever

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It’s completely absurd that the best part of twenty years have chundered along since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out. I barely feel old enough to have fully formed memories of doing things that long ago. But yes, fine, calendars don’t lie, and it really has been seventeen years, three console generations, and an entire global pandemic between the time that Oblivion first graced our monitor screens… and now.

It’s difficult to remember just how different the gaming landscape was back then. With the Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PS3 still months away from launch (and the latter stumbling its way out of the birth canal on a wave of bad PR), the Red Ring saga yet to hit Microsoft in the pocket, and Don Mattrick still working in relative obscurity at Electronic Arts, the Xbox brand was a serious, solid contender in the console space. It had beaten its contenders onto shelves by a full year, and by March 2006, the stage had been set for Next Gen to truly start.

Which it did. Despite Kaz Hirai’s flippant insistence that Sony, and Sony alone, would decide when the next generation starts, what actually kicked it off was a little game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in what would be a watershed moment not just for Bethesda Softworks, but for RPGs in general.

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