This 8-bit Morrowind from someone with ‘no experience with game making’ will run on your actual Game Boy Color and is genuinely kind of great

I have one job here at PC Gamer and it’s this: reminding you all that I really like Morrowind quite a lot. They tell me that’s “not a personality,” in response to which I begin levitating.

Anyway, today’s Morrowind news is this: someone’s making a version for the Game Boy. Not “someone made a Game Boy-styled recreation,” someone is actually going through the trouble of making a cut-down Morrowind you can run on a literal Nintendo Game Boy Color.

From Jordanly on Itch.io, The Elder Scrolls Travels: Morrowind is a free, bitesize Morrowind experience made in GB Studio. A confession: it was actually made some time ago, but it got a fresh update yesterday that brought it to my attention, and now I’m bringing it to yours.

“I’ve seen and played a few Gameboy demakes before and I thought it would be fun if there was a demake of Morrowind,” writes Jordanly in a blog post accompanying the game’s earliest iterations. “I have no experience with game making, but for some reason I decided to try.”

The result is… kind of fantastic? Make no mistake—this isn’t the entire Morrowind experience condensed down onto a GB cartridge, but you can pick a race (and one of three heads for each one) and a class, meander through Seyda Neen, even take a silt strider (which you pilot! Yourself!) to Vivec to check out Miun-Gei’s wares (I’m reasonably certain Miun-Gei does not, as of the current patch, have wares).

(Image credit: Jordanly)

It’s a charming, faithful little thing, and all the more impressive for the fact that Jordanly apparently only made it on a whim—it got its start when they fired up a pixel art app and began doodling some Morrowind characters.

It’s a testament to Morrowind’s sense of place, I think. Where I often feel like Skyrim and Oblivion—both of which I like to one extent or another—try to get the setting out of your way, letting you strike out as any flavour of adventurer you choose in a world that rarely tries to feel like more than ‘vaguely fantasy-flavoured,’ Morrowind grounded itself in geography, history, and cosmology that it took quite seriously and hoped you would, too. It’s a big reason the places you can visit in this little GB demake feel so familiar: they feel like places you’ve genuinely been to and immersed yourself in.

It is, also, testament to how cool democratised game-making tools are. Time was, making a Game Boy Color game required a studio. Now it can be done by someone whiling away the hours doodling some pixel Dunmer. Not all modern tech is bad, I think.

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