Oblivion guru found a way to save the Emperor and his bodyguard in the original game, getting the drop on his assassin like the fantasy secret service

The YouTuber known as Bacon is, as our own Ted Litchfield wrote in an article yesterday, the undisputed king of Oblivion meme videos. If you’ve ever cracked up at a viral video of Oblivion’s unmatched comic timing, odds are good it was a Bacon video you watched.

But Bacon’s talents don’t just extend to comedy, he’s also a hero of Tamriel. In a recent video, he showed off how he managed to save Emperor Uriel Septim (that’s Patrick Stewart’s doomed character from the start of the game) from the assassin’s blade like an FBI guy judo-chopping Lee Harvey Oswald before he managed to get a shot off.

Turns out it’s pretty easy: by saving and loading while pressing forward next to a particular door in the game’s tutorial area, you can clip through the level and—so long as your targeting is on point—land directly behind the assassin who’s scripted to merk the Emperor. He isn’t even hostile—you can just bonk him over the head and save everyone the trouble of the Oblivion Crisis.

“It wasn’t console commands or mods like a lot of people thought,” Bacon told PCG. “It was just breaking the game and seeing what happens.” Bacon’s adventures in sequence-breaking eventually produced a couple of videos. One is the punchy meme video This is where my journey ends, where the Emperor still dies but it seems to break poor Baurus’ brain—leaving him endlessly applauding the corpse like some kind of weird Twin Peaks scene—and also features “some extra dialogue which you only get if you are undetected by the Mythic Dawn, which almost never happens naturally.”

The other video was Oblivion but I save Emperor Uriel Septim, which shows the process of saving Tamriel’s ruler and leading him about the main quest with you as if he’s a lost child in a supermarket.

Well, kind of, anyway. Of course, Oblivion (the game) doesn’t have a different route for the story to go if you clip through its tutorial and save the Emperor, so everyone acts like he’s dead anyway, even when he’s standing right behind you and having idle conversations about mudcrabs with passers-by. Per Bacon, the Emperor isn’t even the hardest guy to save in Oblivion’s tutorial. You’ll have a much harder time trying to keep his bodyguard Glenroy alive. Bacon’s video on saving the Emperor is almost an hour long, not because it’s hard to save Uriel, but because it’s a real chore to keep the game’s other scripted deaths from happening.

“It was like 70 hours of me trying to sequence break Oblivion with lots of glitches to finish the game while saving the Emperor and preventing most other scripted deaths,” says Bacon. It was worth every second, I say. Even if Cyrodiil’s other residents don’t acknowledge it, Bacon’s still a hero of Tamriel to me.