This is slightly off the PC Pro beat but given that a great, big slab of gaming history is involved I decided to stretch my legs. Bethesda (that’s them who made Fallout 3 and Oblivion) have just released the Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free in order to celebrate fifteen years of the series. It’ll happily rattle around in a 150MB corner of your hard drive and needs only hugs to make it happy. You’ll need that gaming-gateway-to-the-past DosBox to get it running – that’s right chums Daggerfall really is that ancient – but if you’ve never gazed upon this gem I suggest you do so now.

You see, Daggerfall wasn’t coded so much as assembled out of dark matter. That 150MB contains a huge landscape filled with thousands of towns, dungeons and happenings. It’s randomly generated meaning that after a few hours you’ll inevitably find yourself wandering down the same section of corridor for the eighth time, but it’s still quite an incredible sight when you first clap eyes on that immense game map.

I remember playing Daggerfall obsessively for about a month when it came out, and to this day it stands out as one of my happiest gaming experiences. Up until that point, the games I’d played had held my hand and gently shooed me towards a destination. Admittedly there was probably some face-eating zombie fiend at the end of that outstretched finger, but they were still gentle in comparison to Daggerfall. This was a game that kicked your out on your arse 10 seconds after you’d completed the Character Generation process, leaving you to work it out for yourself.

And there was a lot to work out. Crafting your own spells, buying houses, riding horses, joining competing guilds, trading, becoming a vampire, werewolf or rather splendid wereboar were among the millions of things you could run off and do. Well, supposedly. I reckon that around 57% of the game worked. The rest was buggier than a tramp’s beard. It didn’t matter, the sheer ambition of the thing was dizzying; which as any avid gamer will tell you is often enough of an apology within itself.

So here it is, Oblivion’s sire, available for free. The graphics are terrible, the sound sucks, and much of it is broke. It’s also massive, ridiculously ambitious, and it’ll run on your watch. It’s also free. Go play.