One mad modder got the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind running on Fallout 4’s in-game Pip-Boy

Days before committing the world historic sin of putting quest markers into The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, modder RPGKing117 already earned himself a pardon: He created a mod that lets you play The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on the in-game Pip-Boy and computer terminals of Fallout 4.

RPGKing117 has a nice demonstration of the mod up on YouTube, showing it running on a stationary computer terminal rather than Fallout 4’s iconic wrist-mounted menu system. It is, perhaps, not the optimal way to play Morrowind.

Forget the low resolution: That dark, monochrome screen is gonna be the real dealbreaker for a 100-hour playthrough. You’ll also need a computer powerful enough to run both games at once⁠—not an absurd luxury these days, but this might not work on Steam Deck.

But who cares about that, nerd? A game within a game is one of the funniest bits you can pull in the medium, by my reckoning, and there is an undeniable anarchic joy to seeing the 2002 RPG rendered in this way. My favorite little touch: The in-game cassettes with Morrowind’s box art that you can pick up and drag around, maybe decorate your house in Sanctuary with.

Under the hood, the mod is fairly simple to understand. “OpenMW runs in a hidden window locked to 876×700 which gets upscaled to 1024×1024 and streams its framebuffer directly into Fallout 4’s Pip-Boy display in real time,” RPGKing117 wrote on the project’s GitHub page. “A custom F4SE plugin handles the holotape trigger, the shared-memory bridge, and input passthrough so keyboard controls reach Morrowind while you’re in-game.”

That relative simplicity doesn’t mean it was easy to get running, though. “It took quite a lot of work, countless hours of beating my head against a wall but I am quite proud of the outcome, RPGKing117 wrote in the video description of the mod’s demonstration on YouTube. “I hope anyone who tries this out, enjoys it.”

I’m enjoying just looking at it. You’ll need the Steam versions of Fallout 4 and Morrowind, plus the Fallout 4 Script Extender to run the mod. You don’t have to grab the essential OpenMW source port yourself, though: The mod runs a custom fork of OpenMW included with RPGKing117’s installer on GitHub.