Skyrim artist secretly worked to save the RPG's ugly werewolves from getting cut before taking a demo to Todd Howard and getting a big reaction: "This is f***ing awesome"

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Werewolves are an art

Skyrim
(Image credit: Bethesda)

The beauty standard for werewolves is a confusing thing – should the beasts have opposable thumbs? Tails? Is it ok for them to be clean-shaven, or should every inch of their bodies be matted in dog fur? These questions with no answers initially made the werewolves in Skyrim look like embarrassing atrocities, but then former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones graciously gave them a total makeover to save them from being cut from the RPG entirely.

In a new interview with YouTube channel Kiwi Talkz, Mejillones laments that the process of designing werewolves for Skyrim was originally "going in a really south direction."

"It was bad," he continues. "I mean, it was really bad, and a lot of people were like, 'Oh man, this is bad.'" So, needless to say, it was bad. Having only seen the final product, I think that Skyrim's werewolves are a perfect encapsulation of the action RPG's balance of savagery and fantasy. But Bethesda's first design for them was more of a science experiment – Mejillones says it "just had a head of a dog on a person, on a human body, with human hands and everything."

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.