VICTORY IN THE ARENA
Amusingly, the biggest RPG success story of the ’90s was never meant to be one. Bethesda, then a largely unknown company despite a couple of Terminator and Wayne Gretzy games, was making a relatively simple gladiatorial combat game called Arena in which you’d take a team of fighters around the fantasy world of Tamriel in the hope of making some cash. During development, the ultimate feature creep set in. First a few RPG elements were added to the mix. Then dungeons. Then quests. And then the whole arena combat thing was ditched in favor of it just being a regular, single-character RPG. The title stuck around solely because the marketing materials had already been printed, the team handwaving it as Tamriel being so dangerous that the whole place was nicknamed ‘the Arena’. To make it sound more of an RPG, they then stuck on the name The Elder Scrolls.
The Elder Scrolls raised many bars. Visually, it looked fantastic for the time. The map is about six million square kilometers in size, though almost all of it created using procedural generation. (Of its several hundred dungeons, only around 15 are actually connected to the plot.) It has day and night cycles. It’s got weather systems. Unfortunately, Arena also has more bugs than a lifelong entomologist, and a starting difficulty best described as psychotic. (Infamously, Elder Scrolls III designer Ken Rolston admitted to having started it over 20 times and only getting out of the tutorial dungeon once).
And for all of that, it bombed. Bad marketing led to just 3,000 copies sold out of the gate, which co-designer Ted Peterson later commented was less than the sales of his Terminator: 2029 expansion. And Terminator: 2029 was, putting it kindly, garbage. Word of mouth saved the day, and two years later Bethesda released Daggerfall. This one was only the size of Great Britain and no less buggy. While players looking for a deep story were disappointed, nothing offered close to its level of freeform adventuring—with guilds to join, several religions, the ability to create your own magic spells, and even to become a vampire or werewolf. Plus, it had box art that gave some idea of what the game was about, rather than being fronted by a sword-wielding lady in a poorly fitting bikini. Later games would radically shrink the size of the world to allow for hand-crafted design, at the expense of the freedom and range of options, but we all know how that story ends. Instead of killing Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls series now sells millions of copies, and is one of the most popular RPG series ever.