15 Years After Oblivion, Skyrim Anniversary Edition Throws In Free Horse Armor

Skyrim Anniversary Edition has arrived, with a few freebies for people who own Skyrim Special Edition and more than 500 extras for those willing to buy the new edition. But there’s an added bonus, which is also a long-running meme—the famous (and at the time, controversial) horse armor from Oblivion is free for Skyrim via the Creation Club.

If you’re out of the loop on why Oblivion’s horse armor is noteworthy, we can get you caught up quickly. Way back in 2006, Bethesda offered up a set of premium horse armor for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which at the time seemed ridiculous. Who would pay $2.50 for a cosmetic in a singleplayer game? And why would Bethesda even think anyone would? The very notion was absurd and ‘horse armor’ quickly became a common term applied to any developer selling premium add-ons for a few extra bucks.

Needless to say, horse armor won. Premium add-ons are completely common nowadays, and you can thank Bethesda for leading the charge on making microtransactions a part of our lives with its fancy horse clothing.

And now here we are, on Skyrim’s 10th anniversary, many of us paying Bethesda for a third or maybe even fourth time for a new edition of Skyrim. This time, at least, the horse armor is free.

If you want it for your horse, here’s how to grab it. In the menu when you start the game, click on Creation Club. You’ll see the armor come up in the Featured tab. Click it (there’s elven and steel versions), then click download.

Once it’s downloaded Skyrim will need to restart, after which you can visit any stable and talk to the guy outside who sells horses. In the dialogue options, there will be a new line to click on which says you’d like to armor your horse. Choose which version you want and pay 500 septims, and bingo, your horse is now a meme from 2006. 

It does actually look pretty dope:

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.