It's not often that a videogame will literally save your life. Yet according to a Redditor named RabbitMix, that's exactly what happened in a recent, very unfortunate incident involving a bullet and his copy of The Elder Scrolls Anthology.
"While I was at my desk playing Prey last night I heard a sudden loud pop and the sound of breaking glass," wrote RabbitMix in a series of images posted to Imgur. "At first I thought a light bulb had burst but soon noticed the cloud of drywall dust in the air and a bullet hole to the left of my monitor."
RabbitMix told us in an email that his initial thought had been that something in his room, perhaps a battery or something in his PC, had exploded and put the hole in the wall. But when he started moving things around in a search for the source of the damage, he noticed that the hole was actually pushed outward, into his room.
"My roommate started to get really freaked out when I pointed that out to her and kept repeating, 'We have to leave the house, we have to call the cops, we need to get out!'" he said. "I was still in a daze from the sudden flurry of activity and I continued looking for a bullet in my room or a hole on the other side of the room. I heard my roommate on the phone with the police and my other roommate calling out to me to come over and sit on the floor behind the fridge, 'So you don't get shot!'"
We haven't been able to confirm details of the incident with police, and RabbitMix would like to maintain some privacy in that regard, but he tells a detailed story. He said police showed up in short order and helped calm things down; the cop on the scene actually cracked a joke about seizing their Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild "as evidence." The officer joined in the search for the bullet, according to RabbitMix, which eventually led to the discovery of the hole in The Elder Scrolls Anthology box.
"My stomach dropped. I thought nothing had been damaged, but now my favorite games had a nice hole in them. I picked it up and opened it to find hole going deeper into it. I opened the middle of the book and amongst disc fragments there was the bullet wedged right in the center," he said. The officer collected the bullet.
"After he was gone I tried to put together how the bullet got into my TES games and it was then that I realized that Morrowind had taken a bullet for me, as I would have been directly in its path if it wasn't in the way," he wrote. "It's kind of poetic that my favorite game, a game that I've given over a thousand hours of my life to gave its life for mine."
The photos on Imgur don't make clear exactly how the pieces of the puzzle come together, but RabbitMix sent us a few more—set up after the incident, obviously—showing where the game was lying when the bullet came through the wall behind a computer desk. In these images (a few of which are below), it's much easier to see how the bullet struck the game after penetrating the wall, and how it likely would've carried through and hit RabbitMix if that box hadn't been there. (The closeup of the bullet hole looks pushed in because after the incident was over, they had stuffed a paper towel into it so there wasn't a "direct open path between my neighbors and me.")
The gunshot was presumably accidental, but RabbitMix's landlord told him that any incident resulting in a police report is grounds for eviction, and so the neighbors may be on their way out as a result. The landlord also offered to move RabbitMix and company to a new, better unit.
And after someone suggested that the game's noble sacrifice should be worth a couple of free card packs in The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Bethesda VP Pete Hines suggested that the studio might have something even better in mind.
@KriHavok98 we can prolly do a little better than that. :-)May 8, 2017
