15 years later, Skyrim fans noticed that Todd Howard was playing a fully leveled mage during the demo

The E3 2011 demo for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been quoted to death over the years, with Todd Howard mountain line still standing as the most famous bit.

Fifteen years later, fans went back through the twenty-minute demo and spotted something everyone missed at the time. The character shown running around in starting gear was actually built up almost to the max.

Around the four-minute mark, Howard flips through the skills menu fast enough that Destruction shows up nearly maxed out. Yet the character wears iron armor, the worst set in the game, and swings a sword at early enemies despite melee combat being one of the weakest skills on the sheet.

What the demo character actually had going for it:

• Destruction leveled almost to the cap

• Sneak at level 100, which is why the mammoth doesn't react until the hero attacks first

• Illusion spells that could turn the character invisible or calm down wolves, though none of it got used

• Glass armor sitting unused in the inventory, clearly better than the iron gear equipped

• Speech left untouched, as if the character had never talked to another NPC

Showing press a fully leveled character is standard practice across the industry, since otherwise a demo can't really show off what the game is capable of at the high end. Still, fans got a kick out of the gap between a hero who looks like a random drifter and one who fights like an archmage, and the build got nicknamed the "devil build."

Once Howard reaches Bleak Falls Barrow, the low-level act drops entirely. He blasts two wolves with a ground-based explosion, drops a pair of protective wards against the undead, and sets entire rooms on fire. The dungeon final boss, a fight most players don't reach until much higher levels, goes down in under thirty seconds.

The dragon encounter plays out the same way. Howard lets it tear through an NPC first, then kills it almost instantly. A second dragon later dies to a summoned storm without the player character lifting a finger.

The one moment the supposedly unstoppable hero looked vulnerable came from an illness. Mid-fight, Howard catches "Ataxia," and the already weak melee stats take another hit.

The iron armor became its own running joke, given how heavily Bethesda leaned on it for marketing. Players pointed out it's the worst armor in the game, the kind any character swaps out within the first few hours of playing.