“We have so much stuff – landmass, locations, quests, themes – and it mustn’t feel like 50 different games, it has to come together. Working from a base of a map, concept art and music – “we always do music really early”, Todd says, “I find that’s a really good thing to get you into the mood and tone of a game” – the team began constructing the different regions of Skyrim: mountains, tundra, pine forests, settlements. Todd Howard, now Bethesda Game Studios’ director and executive producer, led development on Skyrim, as he had for all the Elder Scrolls games since 2000. If Oblivion felt like a Roman legend, and its intriguingly weird predecessor Morrowind resembled a tattered novel from an unknown author plucked from the back of the fantasy shelf at your local library, Skyrim is like one of those brutal Scandinavian folk stories where someone always gets an axe to the head. Its aesthetic is more Nordic: furs and leather, snow and stone. Unlike The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), a glossy, classical high-fantasy set in the most gilded area of the world of Tamriel, Skyrim is grimy and cold. Coming straight from wrapping up development on Fallout 3, a post-nuclear-apocalypse role playing game, the team quickly found a tone and direction that they were excited by. Skyrim was made at Bethesda Game Studios by a team of around 100 people – far fewer than the 400-strong team working on its forthcoming game, Starfield. At a wedding a few weeks ago, I met someone whose wife had played Skyrim as her first ever game a decade later, she’s still playing it.

It’s still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it’s become a gaming in-joke. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. Is there anyone who’s played video games over the last 10 years who hasn’t played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons.

Foreshadowed thumbs up drawing of hands