The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind was a revolutionary RPG that raised the bar for western RPGs and brought the genre to home consoles in a big way. The Elder Scrolls is a storied series with a lot of history behind each of its behemoth entries, so much so that stories are still coming out about earlier entries like Morrowind, decades after their release.
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind released on the original Xbox on May 1, 2002. It dropped players into an incredible fully-realized fantasy world and let them explore and adapt to their new environment with little guidance or direction and was very well received by critics and players alike.
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind was a big technological leap forward for the industry at the time, and in a recent episode of the Xbox Podcast, game director Todd Howard revealed that the Xbox version of the game had to reboot the console during some loading screens to make it run. The issue arose from the game using up too much of the console's memory. Howard explains that when The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind started running low on memory, it would reboot the entire console during a loading screen without the player ever realizing it, which explains the game's occasional notoriously long load times.
In a recent video, YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer takes an investigative look at The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to see just how the game rebooting the console actually worked. It is pretty remarkable that almost 20 years have passed without any fans of the game realizing this interesting feature of the game, the video does a great job delving into exactly how the game manages to do it without the player realizing it's happening at all. Modern Vintage Gamer's video also provides a fascinating look at the coding of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind overall, and is a cool way to see just how such a classic console title was able to work remarkably well on such old hardware.
Of course, with modern consoles, a new title having to resort to rebooting the console to reset the memory is very unlikely, but there are always interesting stories coming out about just how games manage to run. With The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind's important place in video game history, this dive into how the game managed to make such a technological leap to consoles is not only a great look at the history of the game itself but a great look at how far the industry has come as well.
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind is available now on PC and Xbox.