The new role-playing game Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been released and fans have already discovered an Easter egg that the boss is particularly proud of. The most famous meme from RPG history, the “arrow in the knee,” from The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, appears in an extreme version in the new role-playing game.
This is the most famous meme in RPG history: The meme is called “I Took an Arrow to the Knee” and originates from Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
In the game, you encounter a guard who says various lines, including the statement: “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.”
The meme originated with the release of Skyrim on November 11, 2011, and has spread further over the last 14 years. Just a week after the release, there were initial threads on reddit titled. By the end of November, GIFs were circulating. By now, the meme is ubiquitous.
Together with “The Cake is a lie” it is considered one of the most famous memes in gaming – in the MMORPG space, a counterpart might be “Leeroy Jenkins”.
The meme acts like a badge of recognition among gamers, indicating that one belongs and knows what one is talking about. It is often abbreviated with “I used to be X, but then I took an arrow to the knee.” For “X,” anything can be substituted.
“An arrow to the knee? That’s nothing!”
Here’s how the meme appears in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: On X, a user shares the meme:
The adventurer encounters an NPC in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 who has a broken arrow shaft in his head. The shaft still protrudes from his forehead.
The adventurer asks: “You know there’s something sticking out from your forehead? It looks like a horn.”
The man laughs and replies: “A horn? No one has ever said that. That’s a metal arrow, or what’s left of it. It used to be bigger, but I broke it off after nearly poking a woman’s eye out with it.”
“I once heard of a guy who got an arrow in the knee.”
“Ha! In the knee? That’s nothing! You can go dancing the next day with such a scratch, but have you ever heard of someone who got an arrow in the head and survived?”
The head of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Daniel Vávra, comments on the clip with: We have taken “I used to be an adventurer like you” to the extreme! For the boss, the release of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is currently a celebration because it is getting such good reviews. Vávra was criticized beforehand: Head developer of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 complains about Metacritic and a review that messed up his score
