Five of the Best: Mountains
You can’t have a world without mountains! It would be like Holland, you could just cycle everywhere. And what would the mountain goats do? No I don’t like it. A world without mountains would be weird.
They are the titans of the natural world. A reminder we still cannot completely conquer the planet. We try so hard and temporarily succeed, but ultimately we are a speck on the face of a colossus. It’s no surprise we love mountains. No surprise the worlds we make for each other are filled with them. Much easier to climb a mountain in a game, too – you can often do it in your underpants. I feel like I’ve written that before.
Annoyingly, though, mountains have become part of the open-world sales pitch. I bet there’s a handbook somewhere and Chapter One is ‘See that mountain over there?’ Oh I’d like to get hold of whichever rascal started that.
What, it was Elder Scrolls boss Todd Howard (according to Know Your Meme)? What does he know about making mountains…
OK, Todd, you win this one. What a ridiculously cool name for a mountain – the Throat of the World. You see the mountain when you emerge from a cave at the beginning of the game, and it’s massive, dominating the horizon. Naturally, immediately, you want to go there. Todd Howard and pals knew you would. So it isn’t long before you have a quest to do exactly that.
