Skyrim's Iconic 'You're Finally Awake' Intro Broken Down by Game Developer

Even if you haven't played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you would have probably still seen the iconic “You're finally awake” cart-ride intro in some meme or the other. Though the scene is remembered fondly, a former developer at Bethesda Game Studios has now detailed how the scene troubled the team during its making. In a Twitter thread, Nate Purkeypile said the team would struggle for a long time to find the issue that caused the cart to suddenly lose control. Purkeypile had to watch the video hundreds of times to find it.

He said the issue was that it's not just a cart on rails. That cart was real in terms of Skyrim's engine. “Well one time, riding that cart yet again, the cart starts to shake violently and all of a sudden WHOOSH! The cart goes up into the sky like a rocket ship. Like WAY up there,” he said.

For a long time, nobody knew why this was happening. Finally, they figured out that there was a bug — a virtual bee — in the game and not in the software that was making the life of developers difficult.

The issue with this digital bee was that it was an “immovable force of nature.” So, if the cart and the bee crossed paths, it would cause the cart to get flung off the road.

“So game development is hard. Every time you fix one thing, you might be breaking another. This is especially true about open world games,” said Purkeypile, who is now working on a solo indie game.

A lot of users shared their thoughts on the bee problem. One user (@diet_ice) wanted to know if there were any “Fallout stories,” referring to another iconic Bethesda game series, Fallout.

Another user (@SteveAnything) said Purkeypile's story was a perfect explanation why developers started putting the bugs in jars, suggesting that actual bugs always distract them from the real work.

A third user (@chavakno_) paid an ode to the “powerful bee.”

Here are a few more interesting reactions:

Purkeypile, however, did not reveal how the (bee) bug was fixed.