It was December of 2010. My son, Kyle, was 11.
Just like me, Kyle was a gamer through and through. He loved a lot of types of games, particularly racing games, but he had a singular obsession with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an RPG made by Bethesda. He played Oblivion constantly, and in every way possible. He would play it on the TV at my house, he would play it on his PC upstairs, he would play it on his laptop, and he would play it on his Xbox at his mom’s house. He probably owned four or five different copies of the same game. He would spend a day creating a new character, and then quit playing and wake up the next day and make a new character. I think he spent as much time in the character creator making new characters than he did actually playing the game. He had something like 30 characters, and he knew them all.
Back to December 2010. He had the flu and had been sleeping on the couch for a couple of days. It was easier than having him upstairs in his bedroom, and I could bring him soup, water, and he could play games on the couch when he was lucid and had the energy enough to do so. I was working at my computer while he slept on the couch. At the time, I was a journalist covering video games, and that’s when I got the press release from Bethesda with the trailer attached for their new game. The game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I clicked on the YouTube link and saw the Bethesda logo on screen, and immediately hit pause, grabbed my laptop, and ran over to the couch.
Kyle was sleeping. I put the laptop on the table next to him, opened the screen, and went to the video. I shook Kyle gently to wake him up. He was very groggy.
“Kyle, I’m sorry for waking you up, bud, but I think you need to see this. He turned his head to the laptop. I hit play. The moment the Bethesda logo came on screen he bolted upright and turned to fully face the screen. As long as I live, I will never forget the explosion of excitement he went through when he first heard “DOVAKHIN – The DRAGONBORN” and the music exploded in a crescendo of orchestral magnificence.
He jumped off the couch and ran around the house, dancing in excitement for the rest of the day. He must have watched that trailer a hundred times that afternoon. He shouted “FUS RO DAHHHHH” even though we didn’t even know what the dragon shouts were yet, and memorized every detail of the trailer. He was obsessed.
The only thing that matched (and exceeded) his excitement for Elder Scrolls RPGs was his love for space, space exploration, and space adventures. He went to Space Camp twice, vowed solemnly that he would work for NASA, and wanted to be the first human on Mars. These were, in those heady days, things that actually seemed possible. After all, why couldn’t he be the first human on Mars? As he grew older, he continued to play Skyrim (and its predecessor), as well as spending literally thousands of hours designing spacecraft and other machines in Kerbal Space Program, an engineering game that further cemented his commitment to space exploration. He was convinced that being good at Kerbal would serve him well in his future career ambitions (and I didn’t disagree with that).
In September of 2019, after a grueling 9-month job search, I was offered a role at Unity, a game technology company. The very last conversation I had with Kyle was about how excited he was for me, and how proud he was of me for landing a high-profile role in the gaming industry. Two days later, he was murdered, at age 20. All those dreams of space, of adventure, and of exploring the stars died with him, and we were left holding the pieces of those dreams, wondering what to do with them.
Starfield
In 2021, Bethesda announced their newest game. After many years of crafting games set in a world filled with dragons, magic, and swords, they veered off into something totally new and different. They announced that their next game would be Starfield, a hopeful and optimistic game about the future of humanity in space, and it promised space exploration on a scale never before possible in gaming. The gaming press and community immediately dubbed it “Elder Scrolls in Space”. I couldn’t believe it. It’s as if Bethesda somehow knew about Kyle and decided that their next game would be designed specifically around his exact interests. The fact that it was going to be an Xbox launch was icing on the cake, since he was an unabashed Xbox fanboy. Bethesda? Making a huge, epic, grand adventure? In SPACE? on XBOX? It was perfectly bittersweet to imagine how incredibly excited he would have been. I lamented in a Facebook post at the time: “I cannot adequately explain how complicated it is for me to watch this grandiose and beautiful teaser for Starfield. This is a game that would have blown Kyle’s mind with a hype factor he hadn’t experienced since the announcement of Skyrim all those years ago.“
I was laid off from Unity in 2022. I won’t bore with the details, but after a very long and grueling job search, I now work at Microsoft, on the Xbox team, as the head of the Microsoft Game Dev community. Kyle would have been tremendously proud of me, and would have almost certainly been bragging that “my dad works at Xbox bro”. I started three weeks ago.
Starfield, as an Xbox Game Pass launch title, is obviously a Big Deal at work right now. Today is early launch day (check out this incredible trailer), and now that I am on the inside, even as a new guy, I can see the frenzy of activity, all the team members, the vendors, the contractors, all the corporate gears whirring at high speed, unified and energized by our shared love of gaming. I’m right here in the crux of everything Kyle loved: gaming, Xbox, Bethesda RPGs, and space exploration, and he’s not here to share this with me. To see emails with “Starfield launch” as the subject line, to see Microsoft’s internal chat globally joking about calling in sick to play Starfield, to be here, right at the center of it all, without my son who loved these exact things, is incredibly difficult to bear.
I got my first paycheck in 14 months today, so today I bought Starfield. I hadn’t planned on buying it at first (I don’t play many big-studio AAA games these days), but the more immersed I became in this launch, I realized I have to play this game for Kyle, because he can’t. I cannot wait to launch into the endless cosmic ocean and explore the galaxy. Maybe I’ll find my son out there among the virtual stars.
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