Oh my god. My dad would grind that thing for days. His characters, and he had dozens, were level 100+ because he spent more time killing that thing than playing the rest of the game.
I really loved The Elder Scrolls: Arena when I was around 6 or 7. Early Bethesda really doesn't get enough credit, the first two Elder Scrolls games and even some of their Terminator games were truly ambitious, maybe revolutionary. Obviously I didn't know that at the time, I was just a dumb kid playing fun games on the PC, but I understand that in retrospect. So a sequel, Daggerfall had just come out and I wanted it so bad. It looked like Arena but with better graphics, more characters, more features, more everything! So I asked my dad for Daggerfall for Christmas and he told me it wasn't happening because we didn't have Windows 95 yet. I was bummed out but I guess I accepted it.
EXCEPT I GOT IT.
I GOT DAGGERFALL, BABY!!!
But yeah, it wouldn't run on our computer so I had to take it to my friend David's house and play it there. We installed it and the first time we turned it on, our jaws dropped at the 3D intro of the mausoleum. I still remember the first character we ever made, a Wood Elf ranger named Xashar who, yes, took the ebony dagger. It took us days to get out of Privateer's Hold and every time - EVERY TIME - we heard a skeleton, we screamed and ran out of the room. The skeleton sound effect still scares me to this day. It's funny, we were actually too scared to go to most dungeons so we spent most of our time fucking around in towns. Never Daggerfall, though, because King Lysandus screaming, "VENGEANCE!!" also made us scream and leave the room too.
Xashar went on some crazy adventures. He was a member of practically every guild (although he barely advanced in them because we were too scared to go to dungeons), a full-time burglar, a rampaging mad man and an exiled felon in at least half the game's provinces. Eventually he became a werewolf and his hit points were reduced to 3 because we didn't know you had to kill people in werewolf mode to rejuvenate. We started making more characters and experimenting with the class maker, which we totally demolished on our first attempt. 30 hit points per level, 3x magic power, athleticism, the works. Our only flaw in our builds was that all of our guys had 6 languages for miscellaneous skills, but this was because we were idiot 8 year olds.
Every game, we'd break out of Privateer's Hold (we got it down to 10 minutes) and head straight to that island in the middle of the bay, Betony. We'd join the Fighter's Guild and reject quests until we got one that took us to Yeoman's Keep, the only dungeon on the island. I don't even know why we did this because we hated the dungeons, but we'd still end up there for whatever reason. Sometimes his little brother Timmy would join us, but he was a whiny baby and always ruined it. Actually, he was alright and one time he decided one of our characters was "Gimli, son of Gloin, son of Gloop, son of Poop" which was hilarious to our idiot 8 year old brains.
I still love Daggerfall. I don't care if Bethesda's not cool or whatever, I still love Arena and Daggerfall. They were formative on my childhood, but now that I'm older and capable of understanding what they were, I'd say they still hold up. Not a fan of the direction they took after Daggerfall, but the first two will always be gold. I will never......... HALT HALT HALT HALT HALT HALT HALT my love for these games. (Sorry)