The Elder Scrolls

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Elder Scrolls began its life as a medieval gladiator game that nobody expected to succeed. In 1994, when Bethesda's small team told the developers of Wizardry VII they were building an action role-playing game, they were met with laughter. That team not only proved the skeptics wrong, they built a franchise that has sold more than 90 million copies worldwide. Three of its five main games have won Game of the Year awards from multiple outlets. The questions worth asking are: how did a studio that had spent six years making sports games stumble into one of gaming's most celebrated worlds? How did a game that was never supposed to be a role-playing game at all become the template for an entire genre? And what keeps players returning to Tamriel, decade after decade?

• 2. A Game Nobody Planned

  ›

  Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman were the initial designers of what would become Arena, and they were joined early on by Julian LeFay, who, in Peterson's words, "really spear-headed the initial development of the series". All three were longtime fans of pen-and-paper role-playing games, and they drew their main inspiration from Looking Glass Studios' Ultima Underworld series. The original concept had nothing to do with open-world exploration. Players and their team of fighters would travel Tamriel competing in arena tournaments until claiming the title of grand champion in the Imperial City. Side quests existed as filler between bouts.

  As development continued, those side quests grew while the tournaments shrank. Cities beyond the arenas were added, then dungeons beyond the cities. Eventually the team dropped tournament combat entirely and committed to a full role-playing game. By then, all the packaging had already been printed with the Arena name, so the game shipped under a title that no longer described what it contained. Lakshman, working at Christopher Weaver's Bethesda Softworks, coined the phrase "The Elder Scrolls", and the words were eventually given an in-universe meaning: Tamriel's mystical tomes that foretold its past, present, and future. The game's opening voice-over was updated to reflect this: "It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls."

  Bethesda missed their Christmas 1993 deadline, and the game released in the first quarter of 1994 instead. The packaging featured a scantily clad female warrior, which alarmed distributors enough to limit the initial print run to only 20,000 units. The team feared they had damaged the company. But word spread slowly by word-of-mouth, and game historian Matt Barton later concluded that Arena "set a new standard for this type of role-playing video game, and demonstrated just how much room was left for innovation".

• 3. Building a World

  ›

  Work on The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall began in March 1994, immediately after Arena shipped. Ted Peterson took the role of lead designer and aimed to shed what he saw as Arena's clichéd plot in favor of a "complex series of adventures leading to multiple resolutions". Where Arena had rewarded players for killing monsters to accumulate experience points, Daggerfall replaced that system with one that rewarded players for performing actual role-playing activities with their character.

  Daggerfall's scale was extraordinary. The team built a game world the size of Great Britain, populated with 15,000 towns and a simulated population of 750,000 characters. It ran on the XnGine, one of the first truly three-dimensional game engines. The designers drew inspiration from what they happened to be reading and playing at the time, including Alexandre Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask and the tabletop game Vampire: The Masquerade. Daggerfall also introduced a GURPS-influenced class creation system, letting players design their own character classes and assign their own skills.

  The game released in September 1996. Like Arena, it arrived with software bugs that frustrated early buyers; those problems were patched in later versions, and the experience pushed Bethesda toward more cautious release schedules going forward. Two spin-off projects followed: Battlespire, released on the 30th of November 1997, which added multiplayer player-versus-player combat, the only series title to do so before The Elder Scrolls Online; and Redguard, released on the 31st of October 1998, an action-adventure game inspired by Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, and the Ultima series. Neither performed well. Players who had explored Daggerfall's vast open terrain found both games' reduced worlds unsatisfying, and Bethesda took the message: its audience wanted massive role-playing worlds above all else.

• 4. The Craft of Tamriel

  ›

  Morrowind, the third main entry, required close to 100 man-years to create. Bethesda tripled its staff and spent the first year of development building The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, a tool that let designers adjust and balance the game in small increments rather than in large disruptive batches. The XnGine was scrapped in favor of Numerical Design Limited's Gamebryo, a Direct3D-powered engine with 32-bit textures and skeletal animation. Where Daggerfall had generated its world algorithmically, Morrowind's designers crafted every object by hand, using methods developed during Redguard.

  The PC version went gold on the 23rd of April 2002, with a North American release on the 1st of May and an Xbox release on the 7th of June. Publisher Ubisoft was announced on the 3rd of January as the distributor for the European release, handling Morrowind alongside eight other Bethesda titles. Ted Peterson, who had left after Daggerfall, returned to write in-game material and consult on the lore.

  Two expansion packs followed. Tribunal went gold on the 1st of November and released on the 6th, giving the team only a five-month development window after Morrowind shipped. The prior existence of the Construction Set made that sprint possible. Bloodmoon went gold on the 23rd of May the following year and released on the 6th of June, adding the frozen island of Solstheim and a mystery for the player to investigate among the soldiers stationed there.

  Oblivion, the fourth main entry, released on the 21st of March 2006, co-published by Bethesda and Take-Two Interactive's 2K Games imprint. It introduced procedural content creation tools for terrain generation. Two downloadable expansions followed: Knights of the Nine in 2006, and Shivering Isles in 2007. A remaster was revealed and released on the 22nd of April 2025.

• 5. Skyrim and Its Afterlife

  ›

  In August 2010, Todd Howard revealed that Bethesda had been working on a new Elder Scrolls game since Oblivion shipped, and that development was well advanced. The following November, Kristian West, then editor-in-chief of Eurogamer's Danish outlet, reported overhearing a developer discussing the project on a plane. Bethesda did not confirm the report. At the Spike Video Game Awards that December, Howard appeared on stage with a teaser trailer and announced the title.

  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim released on the 11th of November 2011, to widespread critical acclaim, winning Game of the Year from IGN, Spike, and others. Its setting drew heavily from Scandinavia, shaping the climate, creatures, and culture the player encountered. The central threat was Alduin the World Eater, a great dragon whose return endangered all life on Tamriel. Three add-ons came to PC and Xbox 360 in 2012: Dawnguard, which added two joinable factions and a questline centered on vampires and vampire hunters; Hearthfire, which added home construction and the option to adopt children; and Dragonborn, which returned players to the island of Solstheim. PlayStation 3 versions of all three followed in February 2013.

  Skyrim's commercial life stretched far beyond its launch window. The Special Edition released on the 28th of October 2016. Zen Studios released a virtual pinball adaptation in 2016, distributed across Zen Pinball 2, Pinball FX 2, Pinball FX 3, and as a standalone mobile app. On the 17th of November 2017, Skyrim VR released for PlayStation 4. On the 10th of June 2018, Skyrim: Very Special Edition, a voice-activated text adventure for Amazon Alexa, gently parodied the game's many releases. The player character, Dragonborn, also appeared as a downloadable Mii fighter costume in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

• 6. Online and Beyond

  ›

  The Elder Scrolls Online was revealed on the 3rd of May 2012, and released for Windows and macOS on the 4th of April 2014. Console versions for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, initially expected in June 2014, were delayed and arrived on the 9th of June 2015. The game originally required a subscription, but that requirement was dropped on the 17th of March 2015. An optional paid tier called ESO Plus remained, granting access to all current and future downloadable content and a monthly payment of 1,650 crowns.

  The Elder Scrolls: Legends, a collectible card game, was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo on the 14th of June 2015. It released on the 9th of March 2017 for Microsoft Windows and later that year for Android, iOS, and macOS. Its servers stayed online until the 30th of January 2025. The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a mobile game announced at Bethesda's E3 2018 press conference, entered early access on the 27th of March 2019 for pre-order customers and released fully for Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch in May 2020.

  At that same 2018 press conference, Howard also presented a brief teaser trailer for The Elder Scrolls VI, confirming it would follow Starfield. Microsoft's 2021 acquisition of Bethesda raised the expectation that the sixth installment would release exclusively on PC and Xbox. In late 2025, Howard asked for patience from fans, calling the game "a long way off". In a March 2026 interview, he stated that builds of the game were "consistently working every day". Howard also noted in a June 2023 interview that the sixth game may be the last Elder Scrolls title he makes.

• 7. Lore, Design, and Controversy

  ›

  The series' fictional cosmology draws on Gnosticism. One creation myth holds that some gods were tricked into creating the mortal world, giving up a portion of their divine power in the process. These became the Eight Divines, worshipped as benevolent deities. A ninth, Talos, was elevated upon the death of Tiber Septim, the first ruler to unite Tamriel under a single empire. Talos's status remains contested, particularly among the elven races, and that dispute sits at the center of Skyrim's political conflict.

  There is no omniscient narrator in the series. Lore is presented from within the fictional world, written by scholars who carry their own biases and blind spots. Internal contradictions are explained as errors in scholarship rather than corrected outright. Some contradictions, including mutually exclusive endings from earlier games, are treated as magical paradoxes. This deliberate ambiguity gives players room to form their own interpretations, and the developers avoid overruling fan theories through official canon.

  The franchise has attracted controversy on several fronts. Oblivion was initially rated Teen by the ESRB, but after reports that the developers had failed to disclose certain content that would not appear through normal play, the board reviewed the game and raised its rating to Mature, a move described as unprecedented. In August 2011, Bethesda contacted Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, claiming that Mojang's planned title Scrolls infringed on the Elder Scrolls trademark. Markus Persson announced on the 10th of March 2012 that the parties had reached an agreement barring Mojang from using the title Scrolls in any future sequels. In May 2019, a promotional tabletop role-playing game tied to The Elder Scrolls Online was accused of plagiarizing a Dungeons and Dragons adventure written by Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler; after the similarities were publicized on Facebook, Bethesda removed the game from its official page.