While there’s a brief history of the UESP on the Wiki I’d thought I would tell it in more detail from the beginning. Ultimately I suppose it all began when I was grade 5 (1984ish) when my elementary school got their first computers. This was my first real introduction to video games and it continued on through high school and college. Up to this point, however, almost all of the games I played were action oriented: Test Drive, Tetris, Pacman, Mario, Star Trek, etc…. The only RPG I remember playing was Bad Blood which I never really understood, partly because I was playing on a monochrome monitor and couldn’t distinguish anything.
My gaming experience changed significantly when I began University in 1992. One of the guys in the dorm had his own computer and among the games he played was Might and Magic III. It was love at first sight and so desperate was I play it I ended up, er, re-engineering some computers in the school’s lab to install and the play game when no one was around (ahh, the follies of youth). For the next year or two the only other RPG I remember playing was an online MUD named Moosehead (sadly, it seems to be no longer around).
The summer of 1994 was the beginning of the end, so to speak, for it was then that another friend in University introduced me to Arena. I vaguely remember the scene now: a snowy portrait of a town at dusk. While we may now scoff at the game’s primitive graphics, at the time it was by the prettiest game I had ever seen. A few months later I happened to find the game in a small computer shop as one of their dozen games for sale. Needless to say, I bought it.
Shortly after getting the game I found the newsgroup for it and soon after that heard rumors of Arena’s sequel, Daggerfall. At the time the WWW was still in its infancy and information for most games was still being distributed as text FAQs (Frequency Asked Questions) around the newsgroups. Seeing the lack of a FAQ for Daggerfall I started decide to start one, not knowing at the time what it would eventually lead to. The FAQ was mildly popular and I had two other editors, Andrew Franklin and Michael Bodenhoff, join me in maintaining it.
After around a year of working on the Daggerfall FAQ its relatively large size and the quick advancement of the web led me to turn the FAQ into a web page (yes, amazingly its still available). Soon after this one of the FAQ editors, Andrew I believe, suggested creating a general web site for all the Elder Scrolls games: Arena and the soon to be Daggerfall. While thinking for a name it didn’t take too long to come up with “the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages” or UESP for short which I thought was a decent acronym.
While the site has changed in looks, size, and type over the years its purpose really hasn’t changed from that singular moment of creation: a single site dedicated to documenting all the Elder Scrolls games.
