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The Improbable Persistence of Tamriel
The Elder Scrolls exists because a group of people in Maryland in 1994 failed to finish a gladiator game on time. Bethesda Softworks originally intended to create a combat simulator called Arena, but they accidentally populated the world with side quests and lore books instead. This pivot is considered a landmark in industry history. It is also a catastrophe for anyone who values their free time. The series has sold over 90 million copies. This is a large number of digital files, roughly equivalent to the weight of a small mountain if data possessed mass. (I once tried to weigh my hard drive after installing Skyrim, but the scale only told me I needed more fiber in my diet.)
The franchise operates on the principle that if you give a player a compass and a mountain, they will spend three hours trying to jump up the vertical face of the rock rather than finding the path. Bethesda encourages this behavior. The developers built a continent called Tamriel, which is a place where various species of elves argue about taxes while dragons try to eat the sun. It is a very busy place. The sheer volume of content suggests that the development team does not sleep, or perhaps they have reached a state of existence where sleep is replaced by the constant rendering of virtual moss.
Architecting a World of Very Large File Sizes
Julian LeFay and Ted Peterson are the individuals responsible for the initial spark of this madness. LeFay is often called the Father of the Elder Scrolls, a title that sounds impressive until you realize it means he is legally responsible for every bug that has ever launched a horse into the stratosphere. He led the technical development of Arena and Daggerfall. These early entries were remarkably ambitious. Daggerfall featured a map the size of Great Britain. It was full of randomly generated dungeons that were nearly impossible to navigate. (My grandfather still claims he is lost in a Daggerfall dungeon from 1996, though we suspect he just moved to Florida.)
Todd Howard eventually took the reins. He is a man who understands that people will buy the same game five times if you change the lighting and put it on a refrigerator screen. Howard oversaw the transition to 3D with Morrowind and the implementation of the Radiant AI system in Oblivion. This AI system allowed non-player characters to have their own schedules. They ate, they slept, and occasionally they walked into walls for three days straight. It was a breakthrough in making digital people look as confused as real ones. The industry took notice of these open-world standards. Other studios began to realize that players enjoy being distracted by shiny objects every twelve seconds.
The Vocal Cords of High Fantasy
Bethesda has a habit of hiring legendary actors to play characters who die immediately. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Sir Patrick Stewart voiced Emperor Uriel Septim VII. He survived for approximately ten minutes. This is a very expensive way to use a Shakespearean actor. Sean Bean played his son, Martin Septim. Bean’s character also died, which is his primary professional obligation. (I am convinced Sean Bean has a contractual requirement to perish in every medium, including radio and puppet theater.)
Skyrim continued this tradition by hiring Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer. Von Sydow played Esbern, an old man who knows a lot about dragons. Hearing a world-class actor explain the mechanics of dragon souls is like hiring a master carpenter to build a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks. It is magnificent and entirely unnecessary. The voice acting adds a layer of dignity to a game where the player can also spend an hour putting buckets over people’s heads to steal their vegetables. This contrast is the defining characteristic of the series.
Industry Gravity and the Modding Problem
The Elder Scrolls series changed the way games are made and sold. It proved that a single-player experience could have a shelf life of decades. Skyrim alone has been released on every platform known to man, including several that were probably invented in a dream. The game remains popular because of the modding community. Bethesda provides tools that allow players to fix the game, break the game, or turn all the dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine. This is a brilliant business model. It allows the fans to do the work of a thousand developers for the low price of zero dollars.
The lore of the series is another massive undertaking. Writers like Michael Kirkbride created a background for the world that is deeply strange. The history of Tamriel involves time-traveling cyborgs and gods who may or may not be hallucinations. It is a complex set of stories that people argue about on the internet with the intensity of theologians debating the nature of the soul. (This is significantly more productive than my hobby of arguing with my cat about whose turn it is to use the pillow.) The impact on the RPG genre is undeniable. Every modern open-world game owes a debt to the way Bethesda handles traversal and environmental storytelling.
Project Credits
| Role | Personnel |
|---|---|
| Executive Producer | Todd Howard |
| Lead Programmers | Julian LeFay, Steve Meuse |
| Designers | Ted Peterson, Ken Rolston, Emil Pagliarulo |
| Writers | Michael Kirkbride, Kurt Kuhlmann |
| Music Composers | Jeremy Soule, Inon Zur, Eric Heberling |
| Key Voice Cast | Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Lynda Carter, Terence Stamp |
| Concept Art | Adam Adamowicz |
The Elder Scrolls will likely continue until the heat death of the universe or until Todd Howard runs out of leather jackets. It is a series that thrives on the chaos of its own systems. It provides a world where you can be a hero, a thief, or a person who collects precisely four hundred and twelve wooden spoons. This flexibility is its true strength. People keep returning to Tamriel because it is a place where anything is possible, provided it does not involve a ladder or a stable frame rate. The next entry in the series is currently in development, which means we have at least another decade to prepare our excuses for missing work.
Eventually, the digital sun will set on the last copy of Skyrim, and some future archaeologist will find a disc in the ruins of a suburban basement. They will wonder why we spent so much time looking for a lost dog in a fictional tundra. They will not understand the appeal of the sweet roll or the fear of a giant’s club. They will simply see a plastic circle that once held the dreams of millions. Then, they will probably try to port the game to their futuristic brain-implant, and the cycle of the Elder Scrolls will begin again in the year three thousand.
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