The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim launched at a very different time in the video game industry. Nowadays, the bulk of video game sales are digital, meaning gamers are collecting their games without any physical boxes, but when Skyrim first came out, games came in boxes with instruction manuals and other goodies. Pre-order copies of Skyrim even included a cloth map of the game world, which some fans may still have floating around. A different, more helpful map was published by Prima Games, and it too may have been owned by plenty of Skyrim players back in the day.
Just as physical video game boxes and manuals are a lost art, so too are the long-form strategy guides that used to be published alongside games. The rise of the internet made these strategy guides mostly obsolete, but there were some genuinely great ones published over the years. One such strategy guide is the massive Skyrim strategy guide published by Prima Games, which included a large black map of the game world. This map was far more detailed than the one that came with the game, and could be used in conjunction with the info in the strategy guide to help Skyrim players on their adventures.
The Skyrim map from Prima Games shows important locations players can visit in the game, from important areas like Whiterun to the various dungeons that dot the game world. One Skyrim player recently found this classic map buried in a drawer and shared it with the game's Reddit community.
User BossDozzz shared their Skyrim map on Reddit, earning over 200 upvotes at the time of this writing. It seems BossDozzz didn't quite remember where they got the map because after they were told it came from the Skyrim strategy guide by Prima Games, they said that they "definitely stole" it from a Best Buy when they were 15 years old. Regardless, it serves as a healthy dose of nostalgia for Skyrim fans who owned the strategy or otherwise remember the map from back in the day.
Unfortunately, physical gaming media like this is much harder to come by as the industry has become increasingly digital. Stuff like this is now reserved for special editions of games, with Collector's Editions and the like often coming with maps, figures, and the like. It will be interesting to see if the eventual Elder Scrolls 6 has a map of its own to match Skyrim's, and if there are any big physical strategy guides published for it or not.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Anniversary Edition is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.