I remember going to the local Dixons on March 21 2006 on my bicycle only to find out that they hadn’t received any supply of Oblivion yet. That was a bummer. I cursed the whole way back. But all that was forgotten the next day when I returned and took a shiny new copy of the Collector’s Edition home with me. I still have that copy and can’t believe it’s almost 20 years old now.

I loved Oblivion, but had a rough start with it. After only a couple of weeks and playing maybe only 30-40 hours or so I got burned out by it. It didn’t capture my heart immediately as Morrowind did. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do know that I was just heavily into rediscovering my love for retro gaming at that time. I’d bought a C64 again and was about to get all sorts of Amigas to mess around with. Only when that urge subsided after 1-2 years doing that, I really got into Oblivion. I then must have put 100-200 hours into it and got totally obsessed with it. I even sprung for the horse armor. Playing a couple of years after it came out had the benefit of the availability of a lot of mods. I remember using a couple of them to enhance the water and the grass. There was also a higher resolution texture pack.

Since then I haven’t really got into Oblivion again. A couple of years ago, I played it for maybe 20-30 hours through PlayStation Now. But that was the PS3 version which looked a bit bland compared to the souped up PC version I remembered.

Being a PC gamer in the nineties and zeros meant playing with keyboard and mouse. Oblivion wasn’t the first PC game I bought a controller for. I had had the Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad which I used for games like Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. But remember going back to that same Dixons and buying a wired XBOX 360 controller for PC, especially for playing Oblivion. I also still have that same controller and use it to this day. It has an insanely long cord on it, which came in especially handy when I played Oblivion on the Sony Trinitron in the living room which was about 9 meters from my desk. My gamecard at the time had a SVHS out and I bought a 10 meter SVHS cable for it. Not soon after I bought a small form factor Shuttle PC that I could easily lug around which was a much better solution.

So a lot of great memories of Oblivion, which I’m ready to relive with the physical deluxe edition for PS5. In this case deluxe means some extra weapons and armor (even horse armor!) available through an extra quest, a digital artbook and soundtrack. I so wish that those had been physical. Not having the Oblivion soundtrack on CD is not fun at all.