It seems to be too early for this sort of thing to happen, but it seems that Starfield has already saved a few lives.
And we don’t mean figuratively, but literally, Starfield is a reason a whole family is still alive today. As shared by GameRant, a Reddit user with the handle tidyckilla posted a picture of his house on fire with an unusual story, even for the world of video games.
What had happened is that tidyckilla started playing Starfield on August 31 at night. Around 2:26 AM, he heard an explosion, that started a fire in the apartment complex his family lived in.
Now the thing is, with accidents like these, an explosion isn’t necessarily enough to wake up someone to alert them to the danger. While tidyckilla was awake to sense it happening, his wife didn’t wake up on her own because of it. Their smoke alarm also didn’t ring off in a timely manner. So tidyckilla woke up his wife, and they got themselves and their cat out of the house.
This was definitely a serious situation as they still got minor burns after the incident. But as tidyckilla points out, if he didn’t happen to have been awake playing Starfield at the time, they might have succumbed to smoke inhalation. As things stand, their unit did suffer from extreme smoke damage, but they were otherwise fine.
And the perfect denouement to this little story is the revelation that tidyckilla’s Xbox Series console also managed to get out of it unscathed. In fact, tidyckilla got back on to continue playing Starfield in the hotel they moved into that night.
As unusual as the circumstances are, tidyckilla really does credit Bethesda and Microsoft for saving his life. Fittingly enough, tidyckilla ends his story with the words PRAISE GODD HOWARD.
Hopefully, there won’t be any more Starfield stories like this one. But it certainly says something that gaming has become so ubiquitous in our modern lives, that it would lead to a sequence of events like this ever happening. This one is definitely going to the proverbial gaming history books as one of those memorable stories around Bethesda and their games. It’s not every day that you can say that the game itself is the hero of the story.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.