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“The lead designer Ted Peterson had initial worries about the games development after talking to fellow industry peers who doubted Bethesda ability to deliver on such an ambitious project.”

The original development briefs outlined an arena combat fighting style game. The player would travel around from town to town fighting with a team in gladiatorial like battles. The idea of side quest available outside the arena combat was only secondary to the initial planned gameplay. However as the development progressed these side quest started to take more precedence over the arena combat, with the explorable world expanding out to vast cities and multiple dungeons beyond in the wilderness. It wasn’t long before the idea of a medieval gladiator style fighting games was abandoned in favour of a full blown RPG fantasy title. The shift change in the games development was influenced by the games developers’ love of the dungeons and dragons series, with other fantasy games like Ultima Underworld and Legends of Valour also offering inspiration for the development team.

“The team behind The Elder Scrolls series has always seen the importance of establishing a rich and deep narrative. The backstory and lore of the games universe seen as important as gameplay.”

The game was not set to just emulate these influential titles but wanted to surpass them with The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The one design element that set Bethesda’s game apart from the competition was the sheer size of the game world. The entire map outside of the pre-set towns and cities was randomly generated populated by enemies and NPC’s. The game was one of the few in the series to allow the player to explore the entire continent of Tamriel, so large was the map that without the fast travel feature the game was near impossible to play. It could take the player several hours to walk from one town to another or several days to walk to a city in another province. The game was also known for it’s notoriously difficulty for new players, with high level enemies spawning right from the beginning unlike later titles that have enemies level up with the player.

“The Elder Scrolls series is now heading into its 20th year with the release of its latest title Elder Scrolls Online a venture into the MMORPG genre.”

Even though during development the combat fighting elements where replaced with RPG style gameplay, the original title The Elder Scrolls: Arena still stuck. Mainly due to the game’s material having been already printed using the original title. The misleading title and a missed Christmas 1993 launch date led to some early poor sales, only 3,000 units being shipped for the initial March 1994 launch. The subsequent negative reviews and high hardware demands made on the player’s machines didn’t help the flagging sales. The development studio heads worried about the future of the company if the game failed to boost sales, which it managed to do through word of mouth and a rerelease “Deluxe Edition” launching late in 1994. The game soon becoming a cult hit with plans for a sequel in the works in the same year. Bethesda Softworks now had a franchise to establish, with an expanding fantasy universe to explore and build upon.

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“Computers prior to the 70’s cost hundreds of thousands and would only be accessible to computer scientists, whereas companies like Apple and Commodore looked to create a more user friendly and affordable option”

This growing market was not lost on the big console manufacturers such as Atari. In 1979 they launched their range of PC’s the Atari 400 and 800, built using the same hardware architecture used in their video game consoles. The PC’s that Atari produced would eventually result in the poor sales of their future consoles, effectively becoming their own competitor. The early 80’s saw a massive boost in the PC industry with a price drop for most computers making them more affordable to the general public. The most popular at the time was the Commodore 64 that would dominate the PC market following its launch in 1982, with over 2 million units sold year on year. The high number of units and overall market share made the PC and ideal device for game developers to produce games for.

Text based adventure games had being the dominate genre of video games that where developed for the PC during the 70’s, with Adventure and Zork among the more well-known titles. However with the increasing power of the hardware of the PC in the early 80’s, game developers could attempt to create more sophisticated games. The one advantage the PC had over it’s console competitors was the superior memory and graphical capabilities. This allowed for more impressive visuals and the ability for players to save their game playthroughs, something that was impossible on console or arcade machines where the player would generally start from the beginning every time they returned to a game. Large scale RPG (Role Playing Game) titles such as Ultima and The Bard’s Tale demonstrated the powerful capabilities of the PC.  Major publisher Sierra Entertainment grew out of the early 80’s boom in the PC based adventure and RPG style games. The King’s Quest franchise helping them rise to the top of the industry until their eventually decline in the new millennium.

“The ZX Spectrum unique graphical look is due to the limitations of the hardware unable to store the colour information for each individual pixel”

The video game crash of 83’ had being relativity confined to the North American market, with Europe to a large extent unaffected. This was in part due to the PC being a far more popular gaming device there, more than any of the major consoles available at the time. British companies enjoyed a great period of growth with Sinclair Research developing the very successful ZX Spectrum and Acorn Computers producing the BBC Micro. This lead many budding video game developers to look to the PC market as the ideal platform to develop for with a large consumer base and more powerful hardware then the console at the time. The British video game industry would see a number of new companies and developers get their start in the video game industry by developing for British made PC’s. Matt Smith and his game Manic Miner being one of the more popular.

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