Neverwinter Nights was in development at the same time. We didn’t have access to any working elements of it, but we watched their development and saw the fact that they were going to have a game master, and online gameplay, and we thought of that as innovative in the same way that we were being innovative. But we weren’t influenced by them. What I was influenced by — as I had played relatively few games, but I had played Might and Magic VI — and the unambiguous influence there was a website called The Spoiler. It had a Might and Magic fan guide that was the fundamental model for how I used hyperlinking to map content, landscapes, and characters to present the world of Morrowind internally. And it was also like an outline for me to spew a game into in a big hurry.

So I essentially took a Might and Magic-shaped world and then poured completely different content in it. But the internet, a fan-made game guide, provided a structure that I knew could communicate because users built it, and they built it for users.