A Little History | That time Skyrim’s team got a week to build whatever it wanted

Let’s go back to February 2012, about three months after Skyrim came out. Todd Howard took the stage at DICE and played a reel from an experimental build. A huge mudcrab filled the screen. The same reel showed a house with a skeleton butler. WIRED, Game Developer

It started after the game was finished. Bethesda gave the developers a week to build whatever they wanted, as long as they put it into Skyrim itself. One experiment let players trigger their character’s shouts by speaking into Kinect. In another, the team combined a fire spell with one that raised the dead and got a burning zombie. WIRED

Howard presented the reel as a collection of experiments. In an interview that month, he estimated he had shown about 60% of what the team made that week. He said people kept asking when they would get to play what they had seen. Todd Howard interview

A few months later, one feature from the reel made it into the game. The free 1.6 update let players fight at close range or from a distance without dismounting. When Bethesda announced the update, it pointed back to that reel from DICE. Bethesda announcement quoted by Game Informer