Why Elden Ring has video games’ best skeletons

Elden Ring‘s skeletons have a grand tradition to live up to; FromSoftware has been making excellent skellies going back to 2009’s Demon’s Souls, and the bone boys in the subsequent Dark Souls franchise are some of video gaming’s best. To get a better sense of what makes an excellent video game skeleton, I took a deep dive into the history of games’ greatest mindless minions.

Skeletons have been a fascination for humanity for a very long time. Famous skeletons like the Grim Reaper have their origins in the bubonic plague, as do the woodcuts of the danse macabre. In 1963, movies like Jason and the Argonauts memorably brought skeletons “to life” through the magic of stop motion animation. These scenes are still etched in our minds today. Later, Gary Gygax and company turned the skeleton into a staple enemy of role playing games by including it in the original Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual.

These bones are what the current video game skeleton was built from. They also help us understand why Elden Ring ‘s Skeletons are so well-known. You can learn all about that and more in the video at the top of this post, and if you enjoy it, be sure to check out all our videos over on our YouTube channel!