It is one of those stories that sounds almost too ridiculous to be real, but apparently one of the most famous RPG series in videogame history got its defining name partly out of panic and partly out of necessity. In an old interview, original Arena designer Ted Peterson explained that the game drifted so far away from its first concept during development that its title barely made sense anymore. The solution was a last-minute bit of narrative duct tape – and out of that came The Elder Scrolls: Arena, along with a name Bethesda would eventually build an empire on.

According to Peterson, Arena started out as a very different kind of game. The original idea was that the player would fight as part of a team in a series of arena tournaments, with the end goal being to reach the final competition in the Imperial City and eventually face Jagar Tharn. Roleplaying-style sidequests were already part of the concept, but at first they were just that – side content. As development went on, however, the balance completely flipped. The tournaments became less important, while the quests and dungeon-delving gradually took over as the actual heart of the game.

By the End, Arena Was Barely About an Arena at All

The result was that the original arena-based concept got thrown out entirely, and the game turned into what Peterson described as a hardcore RPG. That created a very awkward problem: by then, the advertising had already been done and the boxes had already been printed with the name Arena. So Bethesda suddenly had a game that no longer resembled its initial premise, but was still stuck with a title pointing toward a feature that had effectively disappeared. The fix was to say that the Empire of Tamriel, because of how violent it was, had been nicknamed the Arena. It was an explanation, Peterson admitted, but a pretty clumsy one, and it mostly existed to justify why a game called Arena barely contained any arena combat.

Peterson said it was probably Vijay Lakshman who added the subtitle The Elder Scrolls. The funniest part is that, by their own admission, nobody really knew what that meant at the time. They simply changed the opening narration to say It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls…, and suddenly the game had this grand, mythic-sounding frame wrapped around it. So one of the most iconic fantasy RPG names in the medium was not born from some long-term branding masterplan. It came from the fact that the boxes were already printed and the game itself had turned into something else entirely.

A Desperate Fix Turned Into One of Bethesda’s Greatest Assets

That is what makes the whole thing such a great bit of videogame history. It shows just how chaotic and improvised the birth of a legendary franchise can actually be. The developers behind Arena were not trying to create a monumental brand identity at that point. They were just trying to stitch their transformed game back together with the name and marketing material they already had. Out of that rushed solution came The Elder Scrolls, and from there the series would go on to produce Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. In other words, one of Bethesda’s most important legacies grew partly out of a last-second naming rescue – which somehow makes the story even better.

Source: PC Gamer