It is of course to good a story to be true:
In 2018, a faked snapshot of a UESP page was shared online which falsely stated that, during production of Morrowind, Kirkbride was found under the influence of psychoactive drugs by Todd Howard after being absent from work, paired with a photograph it claimed was taken by Howard of the incident.[49] In truth, no such UESP page ever existed; the story is a fabrication.[49] The image was taken from a music video, fat, that Kirkbride had filmed and uploaded to YouTube in 2013, many years after his time working on Morrowind (the video depicts Kirkbride lethargically overeating as Wesley Willis' I'm Sorry That I Got Fat plays).[50] Lady Nerevar said of the video's misuse, "If you told me that a dumb video we made for fun was going to generate a wholeass conspiracy theory that real life people would ask me about [...] None of that happened in any way, shape, or form".
With regard to the hoax and exaggerated accounts of his writing The 36 Lessons of Vivec, Kirkbride said "You know that comes from a Photoshopped image, right? [...] that’s all a lie. I’ve already given an account of how the 36 [Lessons] were written: a week of bourbon, smokes, and solitude."[52] Kirkbride has repeatedly refuted internet myths that he used recreational drugs[52][53][54][55] and has said that the myths annoy him "more than a little bit".[56] Related rumors that he was dismissed from the company are likewise unfounded; Kirkbride left Bethesda for Zenimax's studio in California,[1] remained involved in the production of Morrowind after leaving the studio,[25] and continued to contribute to subsequent titles.[1][5][9][11]
Honestly, I'd be pretty annoyed if I wrote something so creative and people believed it was because of mushrooms.
Have you read The 36 Lessons of Vivec? They are far enough out there that I'm not surprised that people believed psychedelics played a part in their creation. They also contain multiple secret messages buried in the text, at least one of which spans the entire work.
Not only did this guy wrote legendary lore, he also rocked out to Wesley fucking Willis.
GOAT
Wtf why isn't this the guy in charge of Bethesda??
Because sadly AAA games are produced on the basis of how they perform vs putting that same amount of money in the stock market, not whether they are good 😔
Maybe if he was in charge instead of Cyrodiil, Skyrim and (I assume) Hammerfell we could have gotten games set in the weirdest provinces like Black Marsh, Elsweyr or perhaps even Akavir.
He wrote a lot of Skyrim-centred stuff. There are a bunch of references to it in the game of the same name, and a good few other things clearly influenced, but his vision of Skyrim was pretty wild. Same goes for the stuff he wrote for Cyrodiil. Knights of the Nine was him
I dunno how I feel about a game set in Akavir. At least with Skyrim you have to mod in the weeb. Black Marsh sounds cool, though. Bring back spears!
Elsweyr
One of the things that persistently annoys me about TES is Khajiit morphology - there are 17 different distinct physical makeups of Khajiit (based on the phases of the moons at their birth) ranging from able to be accidentally mistaken for men or mer to sentient housecat and the vast majority of them just...never appear in any given TES game. A TES game set in Elsweyr would have to care about that a lot more.
I looked it up, he left Bethesda in the year 2000 to move to California. He was also art director while Todd was project lead.
If you read c0da and then put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to turn that into a game, it makes a lot of sense to have Todd in charge
This is not admirable
For those unfamiliar, here are The 36 lessons of Vivek
That absolutely reads like the author was fucking blasted
Note that what you are reading was heavily edited. There was a time when it was even more crazy.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for weird TES lore. For example, there's a figure from early on in the timeline that depending on who you ask and what sources they prefer may or may not be either a cyborg from the future or a manifestation of the Missing God.
Or just about anything regarding the secret syllable of royalty known as CHIM, the Six Walking Ways or AMARANTH.
That wiki is worse than TV tropes, beware
What a gloriously alien game, truly one of the RPG greats if for worldbuilding alone.
Wait it just clicked for me that the Telvanni, the magic faction, fucking love building their stuff out of giant mushrooms.
Funny meme and stuff but this is fake.
So they didn't just make no fucking sense to me, they actually didn't make sense in fact.
