It’s easy to forget now, but the first Elder Scrolls game had a rough launch back in the day: ‘It was a disaster in a lot of ways and somehow built a billion-dollar franchise’
Given the legacy it created, it’s easy to forget The Elder Scrolls wasn’t a big deal right out of the gate. The original game in the series, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, wasn’t badly received—our reviewer, Andy Butcher, gave it an 87 in his review at the time—but it didn’t set the world on fire immediately.
In a retrospective on the making of Daggerfall over at Time Extension, Ted Peterson, designer on both the first two Elder Scrolls games, recalled the trouble Arena had moving copies when it first arrived on shelves in 1994.
“Game stores ordered a certain number of copies,” he said, “and when we didn’t ship on time, they started cancelling. To give you some context of how badly it did, the very, very first game I ever worked on was a retail pack for Terminator 2029, so you had to own the original game. That shipped more copies than Arena did early on. But we were lucky: word of mouth got out, and people started playing and enjoying the game. It was a disaster in a lot of ways and somehow built a billion-dollar franchise.”
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To help put that in context, Time Extension tracked down an interview Bethesda president Christopher Weaver gave in November of 1995 to some crusty old magazine called “PC Gamer” in which he was quoted as saying, “We were in unknown territory with Arena, and nobody seemed to believe that a company known for its sports games—no matter how good they were—could possibly break into a genre as insular, even fanatical, as RPGs. The word we were getting from buyers out in the field was: ‘Hey, you guys can’t do that!”
While Bethesda had released games in other genres, like the aforementioned FPS Terminator 2029, in the early 1990s Bethesda wasn’t a name you looked to for RPGs. It was the studio responsible for Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 and Gridiron!, which was why it was hired by Electronic Arts to help finish John Madden Football. (A relationship that ended in court when Bethesda sued EA for failing to publish a promised rerelease of Gridiron!)
Shifting Bethesda’s reputation from “sports guys” to “RPG guys” took some doing, but Arena certainly managed it. I can only imagine the outcry today if Todd Howard announced we’d have to wait a bit longer for The Elder Scrolls 6 because the studio wants to finally get Wayne Gretzky Hockey 4 out the door first.
