The Elder Scrolls Arena launched in 1994 and, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see the beginnings of much that would come to define the series: here’s PC Gamer’s own 1994 review. It was the first game in a series that would go on to become Bethesda’s golden goose, and make the studio one of the most prominent in the industry. But at the time, Bethesda was a much smaller operation, and everyone involved in the game had to get hands-on with every aspect of it.
“We had a great team of hardworking developers who truly put in their best effort,” Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of Elder Scrolls Arena, told the magazine GamesTM in 2014 (an interview recently exhumed by PCG sister site GR+). “No-one wore only one hat, and we were all familiar with what everyone did.”
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Which was not the number of copies that Bethesda needed to sell to keep afloat. “We were sure we had screwed the company and we’d go out of business,” Peterson said. “Month by month, though, people kept buying it, hearing about it word of mouth, and after a while, it turned out we had a minor ‘cult’ hit.”
That’s a modest way of putting it: a 1996 industry estimate put the total copies sold at the time at 120,000 copies in the runup to the release of Daggerfall (and the very fact of it having a sequel speaks volumes).
“The folks at Bethesda kept the franchise alive, poured their resources into it and turned it into a winner,” says Lakshman. “They deserve it. I’m proud that my team could’ve done so much with so little, but I’m really awed at how much more complex the storylines, technology and adventures have grown, and how artfully woven the franchise has become. I take my hat off to the entire team at Bethesda today.”
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