Why Skyrim still matters a decade later

With the exception of a rare few, video games are notoriously ephemeral things.

Far more than in film, TV, or music, even the greatest achievements in games are all but guaranteed rapid obsolescence. Beholden to the ever-evolving technology that powers them, it’s hard for any game to withstand the test of a single console cycle, let alone sustain large, active player communities for a double-digit number of years. For story-focused single-player adventures that don’t live online, the feat is practically unheard of. 

But one iconic title celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2021 flies in the face of those norms, like a legendary dragon soaring through the sky with the roar of a creature that never truly dies: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 

In 2011, Skyrim instantly became the most played game of the year, despite existing for only three of those 12 months. In 2021, the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360-era title (or rather, its countless re-releases) still maintains millions of monthly players according to Bethesda director Todd Howard, who seems pretty baffled himself by its unrelenting endurance. Aside from just outlasting the relevance of the Elder Scrolls series 2014 online multiplayer game, Skyrim still outshines most of the newest, most hyped fantasy role-playing games that boast bigger, more polished and technologically advanced open worlds. 

When I took the Anniversary Edition for a spin, I was stunned to realize just how much playing Skyrim today feels as fresh as it did the first time the title screen’s bombastic Viking choir ever beckoned me to adventure. 

No matter how much time passes, we just keep coming back to Skyrim.

Though a thriving community of modders continue to fill the world’s expansiveness with new possibilities by regularly sharing their custom add-ons through Bethesda’s Creation Club, Skyrim‘s timelessness goes beyond its greatness as a game. Its release received the kind of zeitgeist-y spotlight in which video games — let alone nerdy high fantasy ones — ever get to bask. Even now, Skyrim still thrives as a cultural phenomenon, too, through meme formats that have become mainstays of internet humor.

No matter how much time passes, we just keep coming back to Skyrim. Somehow, this practically unchanged, decade-old virtual world stays relevant, despite the real world around it changing beyond recognition since 2011.

But at the same time, it’s not hard to see why we need Skyrim in 2021 for the same reasons we needed it in 2011, at the height of the Great Recession’s impact on millennial youth (who happened to also be the game’s main demographic). After 10 years, the power of Skyrim still lies in giving a lost millennial generation wholesale permission to leave behind their declining real world, and to get lost in a realm of reawakening magic instead.

It’s hard to overstate just how unexpected Skyrim‘s iron grip on youth culture was back in the day, when the mainstream was even more derisively dismissive of dorky RPGs than it is now. But Skyrim grew into such a ubiquitously collective experience that news organizations like CNN and Time felt compelled to try and comprehend its unprecedented popularity. 

Against all odds, the high fantasy RPG transcended the walled garden of its complementary niches, only to turn nerd culture into an enduring part of wider pop culture. Seemingly overnight, everyone and their mom was forced into developing at least a passing awareness of the Elder Scrolls universe, if only from hearing that unmistakable score blaring while a loved one spent ungodly amounts of time journeying through the Old Kingdom. 

It wasn’t just Skyrim that normalized this kind of wholly immersive escape into fantastical worlds, either. 

With Game of Thrones Season 1 premiering only months prior to Skyrim’s release, 2011 felt like the year that dragons suddenly became acceptable normie watercooler conversation. Granted, Game of Thrones made getting way too into the minutiae of a fantasy world cool for the much wider TV audience. But Skyrim also invited swaths of the uninitiated as well, by popularizing the fantasy RPG to Call of Duty levels of mainstream acceptance. 

As a college sophomore myself who’d developed a staunch distaste for what I viewed as the obtuse inaccessibility of RPGs, even I gave into the hype of Skyrim a begrudging try in 2011. Within hours of starting, I went from “what in the FAQ.com walkthrough fuck is this dork ass shit about classes and builds and high fantasy races” to — soon after escaping the introduction’s Helgen dragon attack — mass-texting loved ones that they wouldn’t be seeing much of me for the next few months, as the fate of the Dragonborn had called upon me to save the world. 

Before Skyrim’s arrival, though, I remember 2011 as a time of distinct hopeless disillusionment and inescapable aimlessness for my generation’s youth. I watched friends prepare to graduate into one of the worst economies since the Great Depression, with mountains of debt and no way to cash in on the promise of better job opportunities. That summer, swaths of millennials even led the movement to Occupy Wall Street in protest of historic wealth inequality, student debt, climate change — only to be mocked by the adults in charge for being frivolously idealistic. 

In the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement dissolved, as desperate millennials realized their forceful shouts about being the 99 percent would go unheard, powerless against the vulturous monsters of late-stage capitalism. But then Skyrim came, and suddenly we knew what it felt like to have our shouts revered as harbingers of a new dawn — the resurrection of humanity’s fight against ancient beasts ravaging the people’s lands.

The Occupy movement’s failure made it feel impossible to imagine that we could ever leave a mark on a world indifferent to its crises. But Skyrim let us play as David, each successful battle against a Goliath leaving behind massive dragon bones that became permanent features on the landscape we reclaimed from its clutches. In the real world, millennials were being derided as the aimless generation deluded by participation trophies into thinking we were special enough to make a difference. But in Skyrim we were Dragonborn, our prophesied purpose a symbol of revolutionary hope for our survival. 

As the years went on, millennial disillusionment with the world only deepened, and with it so did Skyrim‘s ever-deepening enmeshment in youth culture.

Skyrim not only managed to outlive the typically short life span of a video game but conquered the internet’s even shorter-lived attention span.

Most recently, a viral TikTok meme format lovingly recreates the uncanny valley hilarity of the game’s NPCs, ensuring that this decade-old RPG will also live rent-free in the heads of Zoomers, too. Like an arrow to the knee, Skyrim not only managed to outlive the typically short life span of a video game but conquered the internet’s even shorter-lived attention span.

While it’s hard to imagine now 10 years into its undisputed legacy, at the time Skyrim was something of an underdog champion. This dark horse bucked conventional wisdom by unexpectedly bridging the chasm between mainstream and gaming culture. 

Despite near-unanimous critical praise, reviewers in 2011 still noted the game’s obvious technical brokenness and frequent crashes, along with an overall lack of polish — and it’s pretty much stayed that way in re-releases. With the addition of the mods that come with the Anniversary Edition, for example, jankiness, crashes, and game-breaking glitches are almost guaranteed.

Yet what should be nails in the coffin for any other game only endears one more to the totality of Skyrim‘s ambition. 

Credit: Bethesda Softworks

Seeing the game’s seams makes one appreciate the boundary-pushing craft that powers it, especially in comparison to whatever frictionless piece of forgettably safe big-budget polish that dominates the genre more often than not these days. I mean, in Skyrim, entire quests can become unplayable if an errant dragon simply decides to kill a character who’s critical to pushing that story forward. Is there anything more metal than that? Not even the game itself can contain the awesome power of its own dragons. That’s some pretty god-tier video game shit right there.

Regardless of janky, outdated limitations, Skyrim always feels endlessly more alive and lived-in than most of its modern peers. If anything, the friction and instability of its world only serve to make me feel more precious about those dead-eyed NPCs I’ve grown so attached to. When I lose sight of my far too brave horse or (god forbid) ride-or-die companion Lydia during a fight, I panic and drop everything, ignoring the onslaughts from enemies because I’d rather die and lose progress than let them be killed or glitched out of existence.

Like the millennial generation it gave a home to when we needed it most, Skyrim is a beautifully chaotic mess we can relate to. An underdog caught in the liminal space between greatness and arrested development, we see ourselves reflected in its imperfections. How could we not love a game foolhardily ambitious enough to risk complete failure in its idealistic pursuit of revolutionizing the open world genre for the better?

Strangely, returning to Skyrim a full decade years later doesn’t feel like the typical exercise in gamer nostalgia. 

In a world that’s been in a state of perpetual unraveling and instability over the past decade, Skyrim was a constant for the millennial generation

It’s not like the pull of classic childhood games, those revisits to the past so twinged with the desperation to regain something lost in youth or made extinct by console obsolescence. As a game that’s been re-released so many times that it’s probably playable on your smart fridge at this point, there’s no scarcity when it comes to Skyrim. We don’t go back to it out of a sense of loss, since there’s nothing lost about a world that’s still actively populated by and expanded upon by millions of people.

No, when I picked up the Skyrim Anniversary Edition after a decade away from the Elder Scrolls universe, I felt zero nostalgia. Actually, I felt the opposite — like I was coming home to pick back up on a life I’d led in an alternate timeline. After the now-iconic opening scene with the dragon at Helgen, I walked around Riverwood like it was my hometown, annoyed that Alvor (the blacksmith you meet first) didn’t already know better than to spout his Imperialist propaganda bullshit at me. 

Credit: Bethesda Softworks

Before turning on the PS5, before hearing that Viking choir welcome me back like a Queen returned to her kingdom, I planned on playing Skyrim for just a few hours. Then I blinked and oh shit it’s 5:00 a.m., and I only remembered I had a real-world human body thanks to a full bladder. Losing myself in the world of Skyrim is as effortless as walking through the wide-open door of my favorite memory palace.

In a world that’s been in a state of perpetual unraveling and instability over the past decade, Skyrim was a constant for the millennial generation. As the real world further descends into inhospitable hell, its decade-old virtual world will always be there, ready to make you feel like you’ve got a fighting chance.  

Skyrim will never die because, like the dragons that embody the heart of the game, it has an immortal soul that lives on inside you long after it’s been stripped of its scales and bones. Even after you’ve beaten this mammoth of an adventure for the first time, its skeleton still remains, a monument that forever reminds us that we, too, can be the stuff of legends.