“We heard a lot of stories, you know, we called it the ‘sofa game’. Where, if you had a friend who didn’t play these kind of games then you’d say ‘hey you gotta check this out’. It just spilled over into this whole other thing.”

This learning is something that was clearly taken on board with Fallout 4, Bethesda’s follow-up to Skyrim. It didn’t take away any of the in-depth exploratory wonder that the studio captures so well –– instead it looked at the game’s fundamental mechanics and made them easier to understand, better to play and more satisfying to repeat. This arguably created a far more popular game. One that’s at least more mechanically accomplished than Skyrim.

Still, that didn’t stop The Elder Scrolls V from selling over 20-million copies. It spawned several large pieces of downloadable content, and has regularly topped Best Of lists even today. It’s also the first game that the studio has ever, in its 30-year history, returned to remaster.