Sundays are for waking up covered in sand. The roof of your house is missing. A small man stands in the emptied bed of a dump truck. “You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6,” he says. “You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6,” he repeats. “You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6,” he declares once again, beginning to move towards you this time. “You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6.” You realise your hands are tied down. Oh no.
Is he about to sit on your face? WAIT, THAT’S NOW ILLEGAL HERE IN THE UK. NO, PLEASE, DON’T SIT ON MY-time seems to slow as the bare backside approaches your visage. As its cheeks prepare to become as sandy as yours, you hear its wielder say: “And we thought, hey, given the moment…”
Panicking, you scrabble for anything to say which might free you before something that might get a British MP’s hackles up can occur. “Things first went awry when I turned up for my appointment to find a tall German man wearing a cowboy hat asking a PR if he could play the game,” you blurt out. The posterior momentarily stops moving towards you. Buoyed, you continue to tell a story you heard from VGC’s Chris Scullion.
I was asked if I minded sharing my one-to-one appointment with this chap too, to which my inherent British cowardly courtesy kicked in and I lied that it was perfectly fine.
“I want drums”, he said as he entered the room. “We are playing Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Rather than ask him whether he also fancied telling me where I was going for dinner later, I picked up my guitar and went along with it, eager to just play the game.
The bottom begins its agonising crawl towards your kisser once more. You can feel the occupants of parliamentary benches begin to sense a disturbance in the force. Maybe if you can make the bumholder sad, that’ll do the trick. You try to remember how Sebastian Cardoso of Game Studio Unlocked’s presentation on the tragic fates of game studios after acquisitions went.
A hundred and twenty-three of the 362 developers were shut outright. The average life from acquisition to closure is 6.4 years and the median is 5, meaning half of all closed studios were dead within five years of their acquisition.
The familiar names mostly died fast. EA closed Pandemic two years after buying it. Sony shut Firewalk barely a year and a half in. Warner Bros. closed Player First roughly seven months after acquiring it. Bluepoint, closed at the five-year mark, is exactly what the median looks like.
It’s no use. That arse’s shadow its creeping across ever more of your face like your’re a planet with a nose and it’s the Vogon Constructor Fleet. Maybe you can somehow contort your head to the side. Arrrggghh. You call on all the strength of muscles you barely ever use and think of the incredible gymnastic feats executed by Physical Contortion Gamer’s Josh Wolens during an ongoing GTA diary series.
Attempting to do flips, then, just sort of rotates your entire body below the diaphragm while your head and chest area remain bolt upright, rigid in such a way that you could feasibly fly a flag from your own thorax.
Which looks odd. Nevertheless, it is pretty fun to scoot and roll your way through Los Santos. At one point, I attempted a double frontflip in the middle of a part of the map that had been deleted for some reason. It didn’t quite work out, and I ended up colliding with and possibly killing a man in a fursuit.
It doesn’t work. You can’t get away. You begin to scream. The posterioperator stops repeating the words “You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6”. Instead, he asks where that mysterious German cowboy you mentioned earlier has gone. You don’t have a clue, and can’t help admitting as much. “Ah well.” The derriere resumes its descent, now mere inches from your mug. This is the end. You have one last rummage through your mind for possible solutions.
Erm…
Did we know about sand?
The music’s nice.
There’s a scroll.
Respec’s Tom Orry hasn’t managed to save you. “Fine, sit on my face and send me to hell,” you shout into the pinkish ring of doom as British cops prepare to ram-raid your abode and arrest you for crimes against a prude’s definition of acceptable shagging.
The bum stops. Its owner asks if you’ve just said the word Sentinel. “Yes,” you lie.
The arse is raised and swapped for the face of a man. “What a perfect time for you to realise what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called,” he says.
You notice he’s not Todd Howard. Or Adrian Edmondson.
“It’s Ade’s month off and they needed another baldy to play this esteemed role,” Sir Patrick Stewart announces, clearly responding the look of befuddlement your face can still have since it hasn’t been crushed by a ten-tonne tush. You wonder how you didn’t recognise his voice before, especially given he played the emperor in Oblivion.
“Here’s to the next Bethesda game after Starfield,” the Stew sings as the police bust through the door and he’s beamed up before they can tackle him.