Just a thought that occurred in my head.

Daggerfall is certainly a beloved game, but when it was released it was the sort of game everyone was talking about . . . much like the subsequent Elder Scrolls games when they were released.

HD... Daggerfall is before even you were on these forums... to my knowledge before the forums even existed! Where else did everyone talk about it at release?

The Elder Scrolls community was quite large even before these forums went up. Not only did Bethesda have a bulletin board that preceded this (I lurked, but I can't remember if I ever posted on it) but there were lots of fan forums - and gaming magazines were as psyched about Daggerfall then as the gaming magazines are psyched about Skyrim today.

Back before Morrowind was unveiled in 2000 I'd say the center of the community was UESP - which wasn't a wiki back then.

Back before I was using the internet, you'd just ask your friends, and they'd ask their brothers and so on until you found the answers for game problems. It might just have been my friends, but Daggerfall was extremely popular as far as I knew.

Yeah, most of my friends played Daggerfall after it came out, and we shared secrets and stuff between each other.

I remember the old purple forums from during Morrowind's development.

Yeah, Daggerfall was at least well known among all my friends who were PC gamers, though not all of them liked it! Daggerfall definitely wasn't as popular at release as TES is now, but the game itself was plenty well known, receiving good reviews in all the mainstream gaming magazines, etc. It was a very different industry then, so it's always hard to say how popular something was outside of your own group.

I fondly remember the old Bethesda BBS -- the only graphic on the site in those days (that I recall) was a generic looking wizard with a frightened expression. And the answer to almost any question posed on the boards was "Supposedly a patch is on the way to fix that." You could also get to some AOL front page by using the AOL keyword "gamesas." Good times.

Yeah I can also add in all my friends and I were playing Daggerfall. It WAS the game of choice. It was the same with Arena prior to that also. So they definetly had us as loyal buyers then. Good times. Alot of great old sites have gone to the wayside sadly. But back then it was just ... well I definetly remember all the sites were VERY active. Like each new elder scrolls game forums/sites are. It's still the same then as now.