Bethesda

In 2003, when I was eleven, my family's house got broken into and robbed. At the time, it was an extremely traumatic event, but it caused something to happen that would have never happened otherwise: our insurance money paid out for everything, including the collection of games we had for our play-station. We decided to upgrade instead of replace, and brought several xbox games. One of those games just happened to be Morrowind.

This game redefined what I thought of video games. It showed me that potential imaginative storyline combined with open worlds, choices, initiating combat with any character, hoarding, and just generally living another life, could be enthralling and intrinsically rewarding. My brother and I spent so many hours playing it, neither of us ever even finishing the main quest because there was so much we could do. (I finished the main quest years later.) The next title in the series, Oblivion, opened up even more. We played it at my cousin's house, because we didn't own it ourselves. It was fully voice acted- a big improvement on the text-based dialogue of it's predecessor, and it had horses. Skyrim, the latest game, was even more amazing. I've never encountered such a detailed, open ended and interesting world in my life. It's a game that I have over 500 hours logged, over two devices (console and pc.) Bethesda are a company that support modding of their games, and my Skyrim currently has over 200 mods (mostly for deeper immersion, such as a hypothermia mod, and cloaks. Bethesda, the creater of these wonderful games, and also Fallout 3 (another of my top games) are one of the reasons I am currently studying in hopes to enter the gaming industry. They sparked something in a little girl ten years ago, and that spark has continued to inspire me to tell stories through my work.