At this point, I can say "you're finally awake" and you'll know exactly what game we're going to talk about today. The iconic Skyrim intro is so well known that it's even a meme and the punchline to countless jokes.
It was also, apparently, a pain in the ass to create. That’s according to Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda developer who worked on Skyrim, but also a bunch of other titles like Starfield, Fallout 76, Fallout 4, Fallout 4, Aeon Flux, and Metroid Prime 3. So you can be sure Nate knows a thing or two about game development.
"That intro is famous now, but back then, it was just that one thing that we had to keep working and working on forever,” Nate shared on Twitter. “I lost track of how many times I've seen that cart ride. Easily hundreds."
While the rest of us have seen the Skyrim intro thanks to a never-ending flood of memes, Nate’s issues with it stemmed from how the cart itself was physically simulated and then told where to go. “Why you ask? Good question,” and it’s a question we’ll never know the answer to. It sure seems like a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if the cart were simply intangible and the characters were merely floating inside it.
Because the cart was physically real in terms of Skyrim's engine, anything that got in its way would send it flying into orbit. Bumps, rocks, or strange physics bugs would cause the cart to violently shake, spin, or send its horses careening off into the woods.
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At one point, according to Nate, the developers noticed that the cart was catapulted skyward for seemingly no reason. "Nobody knew what was going on at first," recounted Nate, until someone realized that a squashed bug elsewhere had caused a new one for this introduction.
The bug had to do with bees–the item you nab for making certain potions. Bees were at one point in Skyrim's development intangible, which meant you couldn't pick them up. That was obviously bad, so the devs made them real objects that could be interacted with, but that also meant other objects could collide into bees–including a certain horse-drawn carriage.
"So game development is hard,” Nate concludes. “Every time you fix one thing, you might be breaking another. This is especially true about open-world games. Yet, that interplay of all the systems is what ends up making them all super interesting."
Although Nate seems to imply that the buggy intro cart was eventually fixed, we all know that’s clearly not the case. And now that the alternate intro mod has been delisted, there's no way to skip it.
Next: Cyberpunk 2077's Jackie Welles Was Originally "A Bad Guy"
