This 8-bit Morrowind from someone with 'no experience with game making' will run on your actual Game Boy Color and is genuinely kind of great

An 8-bit silt strider makes its way. — (Image credit: Jordanly)

I have one job here at PC Gamer and it's this: reminding you all that I really like Morrowind quite a lot. They tell me that's "not a personality," in response to which I begin levitating.

Anyway, today's Morrowind news is this: someone's making a version for the Game Boy. Not "someone made a Game Boy-styled recreation," someone is actually going through the trouble of making a cut-down Morrowind you can run on a literal Nintendo Game Boy Color.

The result is… kind of fantastic? Make no mistake—this isn't the entire Morrowind experience condensed down onto a GB cartridge, but you can pick a race (and one of three heads for each one) and a class, meander through Seyda Neen, even take a silt strider (which you pilot! Yourself!) to Vivec to check out Miun-Gei's wares (I'm reasonably certain Miun-Gei does not, as of the current patch, have wares).

Fargoth laments his lost ring. — (Image credit: Jordanly)

It's a charming, faithful little thing, and all the more impressive for the fact that Jordanly apparently only made it on a whim—it got its start when they fired up a pixel art app and began doodling some Morrowind characters.

It's a testament to Morrowind's sense of place, I think. Where I often feel like Skyrim and Oblivion—both of which I like to one extent or another—try to get the setting out of your way, letting you strike out as any flavour of adventurer you choose in a world that rarely tries to feel like more than 'vaguely fantasy-flavoured,' Morrowind grounded itself in geography, history, and cosmology that it took quite seriously and hoped you would, too. It's a big reason the places you can visit in this little GB demake feel so familiar: they feel like places you've genuinely been to and immersed yourself in.

It is, also, testament to how cool democratised game-making tools are. Time was, making a Game Boy Color game required a studio. Now it can be done by someone whiling away the hours doodling some pixel Dunmer. Not all modern tech is bad, I think.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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