THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION Was Terry Pratchett's Favourite Game

Sir Terence David John, or just Terry, Pratchett died in 2015, but his wonderful legacy still lives in the series of 41 novels in his Discworld series with over 85 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages. The late author was also a big fan of computers, and even was one of the first authors routinely to use the Internet to communicate with fans as a major contributor to the Usenet newsgroup.

Pratchett was also an avid video game player, and collaborated in the creation of a number of game adaptations of his books. He favored games that are "intelligent and have some depth", including Half-Life 2, Tomb Raider and Thief. In a recently discovered Matthew Peterson's interview with Pratchett from 2009, it turns out that his favorite game was Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

"The basic Oblivion game is extremely good. It’s actually wonderful! The graphics and the sound are immersive. It is largely, like most computer games, dominated by combat. You gain skills, you rise up the ladder, you fight the bad guys and there’s all different kinds of bad guys and you do the quests and so forth," Pratchett explained. While he thought the base game was excellent, what excited him most was the user-created content. “What is so magnificent, and this warms my soul, is the concept of games modding,” he said.

It sounds like the amount of detail and time modders put into their work never failed to impress him. "They write these marvelous mods for nothing, for no money. People say, "Hey this is a great mod!" There’s the crafty-bits mod, and I run that." Pratchett eventually donated writing to a companion mod for Oblivion, Nexus Mod. Nord alchemist Vilja has more than 130 voice-acted lines of chatter written by Pratchett, and his writing was also used for the Skyrim version.

Tragically, Pratchett died to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2015 at the age of 66. His daughter, Rhianna, continues to write screenplays for games, contributing to titles like Prince of Persia, BioShock Infinite, and the Tomb Raider series. You can check out the full interview with Pratchett right HERE.