Design lead on the first Elder Scrolls fondly recalls the days when Bethesda would finish a game, then the team would 'assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun' to get it shipped

The Elder Scrolls Arena launched in 1994 and, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see the beginnings of much that would come to define the series: here's PC Gamer's own 1994 review. It was the first game in a series that would go on to become Bethesda's golden goose, and make the studio one of the most prominent in the industry. But at the time, Bethesda was a much smaller operation, and everyone involved in the game had to get hands-on with every aspect of it.

"We had a great team of hardworking developers who truly put in their best effort," Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of Elder Scrolls Arena, told the magazine GamesTM in 2014 (an interview recently exhumed by PCG sister site GR+). "No-one wore only one hat, and we were all familiar with what everyone did."

This was of course long before the days of widespread digital distribution, when PC games were sh...