Original Oblivion developers gather to watch the 2006 documentary on the making of the game, and Todd Howard sums up the feeling: ‘This is going to be really f**king awkward, watching this’

Back in 2006, Bethesda Softworks made a documentary about the making of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, capturing the scale of the effort behind what was then the studio’s biggest and most ambitious game. And now, to celebrate the recent (and tremendously successful) release of Oblivion Remastered, Bethesda got a whole bunch of the original team back together and made them all watch it.

“Made them” is a bit of a comedic overstatement, but Todd Howard clearly has some feelings in that regard. “How awesome is it to see this group together?” he says to the assembled audience. “I’m more moved than I thought. It’s been a long road, everybody.”

And then, his deeper feelings stand exposed: “This is going to be really fucking awkward, watching this.”

Hey, it’s a fair prediction. Many of us are not fortunate enough to be in a position where we can look back on what we were doing 20 years ago and think, yeah, cool. And the vast majority of us don’t have it committed to film for all time, which makes it exponentially worse than hazy memories you can just try not to think too much about.

But the truth is that the video, or at least the little bits we see of it, aren’t cringey at all, but earnest and sincere; Howard’s “who’s laughing now” crack in particular stands out for me as a throwaway joke that probably comes off better now than it did in 2006. And not because he’s become the face of one of the most successful videogame studios of all time, but because this was a point at which Bethesda still wasn’t quite over that hump, and the “look at me now” attitude, while clearly thrown out as a joke, is something a lot of us can relate to, particularly in hindsight: We’re doing this weird thing, and it’s working.

It also highlights what Bethesda was able to accomplish with a relatively small team. “It felt like a really small, tight team,” former head of publishing and public face Pete Hines says. “I mean, it wasn’t a whole lot more than the number of folks sitting here now. That was the whole company.”

I don’t know how many people are in the audience, but credit listings on Mobygames tell the tale: 285 people have credits on the original Oblivion, a number that climbs to 810 for Skyrim and 4,038 for Starfield. Those latter credits include numerous external studios that also worked on the game, so it’s not just Bethesda, but even so those numbers really illustrate how the scale of these projects have grown over the past two decades.

And how does Howard feel when the show is all over? “It was as awkward as I thought,” he says. But, he adds, “In so many ways, when I see it and look in the room, it feels the same.” That has to be a pretty good feeling.

The original Making of Oblivion documentary was included with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Collectors Edition—if you don’t happen to have a copy of that lying around (or an optical drive in your PC), you can still catch the whole thing on YouTube.