Fallout 3 had done the open world, and Oblivion was still in everybody's memory, but Skyrim took everything open-world gaming had done before and made it more accessible and more grandiose than ever.Ĭredit where it's due: Once out of the linear tutorial, Skyrim suddenly opens like a flower. Replaying Skyrim these days reveals that it hasn't aged as gracefully as you probably remember, but at the time there wasn't anything quite like it. Now all the game had to do was stick the landing.Īnd for most people, it did. By telling us only a little, we imagined a lot, and by November 2011 crowds were foaming at the mouth to see what worlds of imagination awaited. Every trailer or teaser was some thunderous declaration, telling the audience that this was a big deal, whatever it was. Skyrim had a very memorable ad campaign leading up to its release, one that was actually quite coy on details but big on ceremony. I still remember Skyrim's trailer music, as does just about everybody I've ever spoken to about it. Ancient it ain't, so I went trawling back through the game's legacy to see if I could explain this mystery.

In reality, this was a game that came out a month after the iPhone 4S.

And yet check the online communities, Reddit posts, and articles across the internet, and people talk about Skyrim like it was in arcades next to Space Invaders. Dark Souls is an industry darling and it's arguably as popular, maybe more so, but it's not treated like a lovable grandfather. And though a lot of great games came out in 2011-Dark Souls, Portal 2 and the full release of Minecraft, among others-I don't think we see those in the same nostalgic light as Skyrim, even if we like them more. It seems like the world agrees, because nine years later there's no shortage of nostalgia toward a game that isn't as old as it should be one that came out on the same day as Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill (no, really). It wasn't that long ago, right? Yet I can't deny that it somehow feels like Elder Scrolls 5 has always been there that arrow-to-the-knee memes were found carved next to cave paintings of mammoths. Oh Wabbajack, when did Skyrim become old? I remember buying a copy of the game the day it came out, a pimply-faced teenager excitedly studying the free map on the train back home.

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