8 Ways Video Games Blew Your Mind (Without You Realising)

There's no denying that the decision to release Morrowind for the original Xbox must have caused many a Bethesda designer to break out in a stress rash, as the concept of porting a game of this size, scope, and graphical quality to a console with such relatively meager offerings isn't one I'd like to have to deal with let me tell yah.

And yet the game not only managed to make it to Microsoft's flagship console, but went on to become one of the most lauded on the platform, and many to this day still wonder how the team actually managed to pull it off as smoothly as they did.

Well thanks to a collective interview with other Xbox luminaries, Todd Howard revealed that one thing that helped them immensely was rebooting the player console while you were playing it in order to free up RAM.

As you can imagine Morrowind is quite intensive on resources so the original Xbox capped out fairly early on when it came to Random Access Memory, therefore the team would implement lengthy loading screens to secretly hide the fact that they were actually rebooting your console to free up space for the area ahead. It's a mad idea when you consider that rebooting a console this many times could have had disastrous effects on the machine itself, but for the most part, Bethesda pulled it off without anyone knowing.