The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is the game that started Bethesda's legendary Elder Scrolls series, originally released for DOS in 1994. Long before Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim, Arena introduced the enormous fantasy world of Tamriel and established many of the ideas that would eventually define the series: open-ended character development, sprawling exploration, first-person combat, enormous dungeons, guilds, magic, and the freedom to approach the world however you wanted.

The premise is classic Elder Scrolls: the Imperial Battlemage Jagar Tharn betrays Emperor Uriel Septim VII, imprisoning him in another dimension and assuming his identity. The player is tasked with escaping captivity, recovering the Staff of Chaos, and ultimately freeing the Emperor. But the main storyline is only a fraction of what makes Arena interesting.

The game's real achievement is its sheer scale. Arena was designed to give players the impression of an entire continent to explore. Towns, wilderness, dungeons, inns, shops, temples, guilds, and countless procedurally generated locations make Tamriel feel almost absurdly large for a game released in 1994. You can spend hours wandering without making meaningful progress toward the main quest—and that's part of the appeal.

Character creation is similarly flexible. Players choose from a wide range of classes with different strengths, weaknesses, skills, and equipment restrictions, while the game's magic and equipment systems give you plenty of room to experiment. The result isn't as refined as later Elder Scrolls games, but you can already see the series' obsession with letting players build characters that feel like their own.

Combat is considerably more archaic than what modern players might expect. Attacking involves mouse movements rather than simply clicking a button, dungeons can be confusing labyrinths, and the interface takes genuine adjustment. Arena is not a game that holds your hand. Its age is obvious, and part of playing it today is accepting that you're dealing with the design conventions of early-1990s PC RPGs.

That friction is also part of its charm. Arena feels like a game from a period when developers were still figuring out how much freedom a computer RPG could give the player. It is ambitious to the point of being ridiculous, and sometimes that ambition gets the better of it.

The best part is that Arena is officially available for free from Bethesda. You don't need to track down an abandoned physical copy or rely on questionable downloads to experience the beginning of one of gaming's most important RPG franchises.