On Nov. 11, 2011, a Palindrome-Perfect Release Date Sent Millions of Players Into the Snowy Mountains of Skyrim

Few release dates are as tidy as Nov. 11, 2011. Bethesda Softworks put The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on shelves on 11/11/11, a day that looked as though it had been designed for a fantasy blockbuster. For many players, the winter that followed disappeared into its mountain passes.

Dragonborn Day

Skyrim, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, was the fifth main entry in The Elder Scrolls series. It launched simultaneously on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game dropped players into the northern province of Skyrim as the Dragonborn, a hero able to absorb the power of slain dragons and speak it aloud as a "Shout." The date had been revealed the year before, in a trailer shown at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, which gave fans nearly a full year to circle it on the calendar. The pitch was freedom more than plot. A main quest existed, but the map invited players to ignore it, join guilds, hunt bears, brew potions or simply walk toward the nearest unexplored peak. Plenty of them started the game with a goal and ended the evening somewhere else entirely, with no idea how they had gotten there. The most famous quest in the game was, for many, the one they never got around to finishing.

Critics largely embraced the result, and Skyrim took the top prize, Game of the Year, at the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards the following month. Its reach outlasted any review cycle. Bethesda reissued the game for new hardware again and again, including a Special Edition in 2016 and a version for Nintendo's Switch, and players kept building mods that rewrote its rules. The community's favorite joke, that the game would be ported to nearly anything with a screen, became less a joke than a business plan. A release date chosen for its symmetry had, in the end, produced a game that nobody seemed able to put down for good.