Nearly every Skyrim player has made the same early-game mistake: killing the infamous chicken in Riverwood, then being blindsided by an intense NPC reaction — a result the developers say emerged more by accident than by design.
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<p id="p-2">Matt Carofano, who served as lead artist on Skyrim at Bethesda Game Studios, discussed the incident in a recent <a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.nintendolife.com/features/its-a-bit-of-a-joke-at-this-point-skyrim-dev-on-returning-for-a-switch-2-re-release" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-url="https://www.nintendolife.com/features/its-a-bit-of-a-joke-at-this-point-skyrim-dev-on-returning-for-a-switch-2-re-release" data-hl-processed="none" data-mrf-recirculation="inline-link">interview with Nintendo Life</a>. "We made NPCs overreact to what you did," he explains. "Everyone attacks the chicken in Riverwood, which is the very first town you come to, and then you're wanted. There's no getting around it."</p>
<p id="p-3">Carofano says the whole episode became a defining memory for the team precisely because it was unplanned. The chicken was registered as part of the town's faction, so harming it flagged you as an enemy of the settlement — and the townsfolk promptly defended their feathered resident.</p>
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<p class="paywall" aria-hidden="true">"We discussed how much freedom we wanted to give players to fool around without being punished too quickly, and how fast we could reset things," Carofano adds. Skyrim’s living systems and overlapping interactions are what kept surprising the team — and what still delights players today.</p>
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<p id="p-4">He sums it up nicely: sometimes a chain of events spirals out of control — a giant attacks, monsters join in, and then a dragon arrives — and while that wasn’t planned, it often makes for memorable, emergent moments. As a long-time fan, I can attest that those unplanned collisions of systems are part of the series' charm, though it’s fair to wonder whether Riverwood's residents needed to react so fiercely over a single chicken.</p>
<p id="p-5">If they’d been more forgiving, we might never have gotten one of the franchise’s most enduring memes. Fourteen years on, that joke still lands — so take this as friendly advice: when you see a chicken in Skyrim, it’s best to keep walking.</p>
<p class="paywall" aria-hidden="true"><em>Skyrim's Switch 2 port "runs like wet a**," players say, as the RPG is plagued with "horrendous" input lag that "genuinely makes it unplayable."</em></p>
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