"So they had this bifurcation of memory where you had 50% for game logic and 50% for graphics," he continues. "And that was a hard boundary, you couldn't break that. Whereas the 360 had a single block of memory and it was up to you how you wanted to divide it up." As Nesmith states, Sony's system indeed had its advantages over Microsoft's own - but certainly not in terms of Skyrim's grueling porting process.

"I remember the enormous amount of effort our programmers put into making it work at all on the PS3," says the former lead. "It was a Herculean effort, and my hat's off to everybody on that team who did that work, because that was thankless, hard, long hours to make that happen at all." Despite the hard work, though, the port still suffered upon its release. Fans may recall frame rate drops, lag, and lower-quality visuals.