That mountain is not just a backdrop,” Todd Howard once said, introducing Skyrim to the world. “You can walk all the way to the top of that mountain.” The winning quote has become immortalised as a meme: “See that mountain? You can climb it.”
It’s a phrase that encapsulates both the wonder and familiarity of open worlds and the genre that’s been built around them, echoed in many game reveals since. How did the promise of distant peaks become not only possible, but a cliché? For that story, we have to go right back to the beginning of PlayStation, and a little beyond. The open world genre is a technical miracle; the work of thousands of developers over decades. And that work isn’t yet done.
See that planet? You can fly there.
PLAYSTATION
The rise of the overworld
Early in PlayStation’s life there were no continuous 3D open worlds to be had. Levels had borders and great distances were travelled only via loading screens. A skybox provided your sense of a horizon, never to be crossed. Yet even within these hard technological constraints, RPG designers managed to design the first overworlds – connecting discrete areas via imagination and sticky tape.
It began in the 1980s, with Ultima. Richard Garriott’s influential RPG tasked the hero with navigating a fantasy overworld dotted with blocky icons representing castles and pirate ships. Japanese designers looking to the West for inspiration did the same, sending an oversized player sprite deep into the forests and mountain ranges of Dragon Quest to fight in random encounters with slimes.
By the mid ’90s, on PlayStation, Final Fantasy VII carried the torch for that same sense of scale and exploration. Square’s classic adventure was intimate enough to sell relationships with characters like Barret and Aerith and to allow you to track every sword swing in battle. Yet it also zoomed out – first to take in the industrial majesty of Midgar, and then again, far beyond the boundaries of the opening metropolis.
THE WORLD IS YOURS
“Just when it appears that the entire game will take place in the city,” wrote IGN in its 1997 review, “the venue changes to a fully 3D, fully rotatable engine, and players will find that the city is a mere dot on the enormous world map.” The planet of Gaia was pockmarked with towns and ruins, as well as natural barriers like deserts –
