I learned today of the passing of Julian LeFay, the polymath developer at Bethesda who was project lead on Daggerfall. Bethesda credited him as "the driving force in the creation of The Elder Scrolls." Such worlds are the works of many hands, but LeFay's fingerprints were all over that series and Daggerfall in particular. It was an awesome game in the most fundamental sense of the world: from its engaging intro cinematic to its vast scope to the endless approaches one could take to character creation, my friends and I could only gawp as we attempted to wrap our minds around it. LeFay was not only project lead but also a lead programmer, creative director, and voice actor, which means much of those wonders came directly from him.
There are titles from which I can trace a direct inspiration to my own game development, and developers whose names I knew even as a kid. That isn't true of Daggerfall or LeFay. But Daggerfall opened broad vistas of possibility not only within itself but as to game development in general: nothing was beyond reach. Like all games, Daggerfall must have begun as a dream, and it filled me with dreams of my own.
Godspeed, Julian LeFay.