Apparently the name of one of the most famous RPG series of all time was a last-minute band-aid: ‘I don’t think he knew what it meant any more than we did’

Here at PCG towers we’ve recently been unearthing a bunch of classic interview material from our publishing company Future’s decades-long history in print media. Earlier today I wrote about a 2014 interview in which the design lead on the first Elder Scrolls fondly recalled the days when Bethesda would finish a game, then the team would “assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun” to get it shipped.

This led me down a rabbit hole towards an even older interview with designer and Daggerfall lead Ted Peterson, conducted with GameSpy in 2001, in which he answers a question I’d never thought to ask—why’s it called The Elder Scrolls: Arena anyway?

“I was one of two designers on it, the other being Vijay Lakshman, who along with Julian LeFay really spearheaded the initial development of the series,” says Peterson. “Up to that time, Bethesda had never done a roleplaying game, only action games like the Terminator series and sports titles like Wayne Gretzky Hockey. I remember talking to the guys at SirTech who were doing Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and them literally laughing at us for thinking we could do it.”

We’ll get to the name, but the context behind it is how Arena changed over the course of its development from a combat-oriented game to more of an RPG.

“Julian, Vijay, and I were all longtime pen-and-paper roleplayers, and fans of the Looking Glass Ultima Underworld series, which was certainly our main inspiration,” says Peterson, who also cites a “completely forgotten” contemporary title called Legends of Valour: “It got pretty pitiful reviews and not many people bought it, but I really had fun with it.”

Arena was always meant to have a “little bit” of an RPG element to it, but over the course of development this changed from a side-bonus to the game’s main focus.

“The initial idea was that there was a series of tournaments in an arena, and your character fought in a team to win the coveted title against other teams,” says Peterson. “A story developed that there was an evil wizard named Jagar Tharn who you could only fight once you made it to the final tournament in the Imperial City. Along the way you could do sidequests which were more roleplaying in nature.

“Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important and the sidequests became more important. We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving.”

Which led to a realisation: Arena wasn’t really a game about an arena any more.

“In the end, we had a game that almost didn’t resemble our original idea at all,” says Peterson. “It was really a hardcore roleplaying game, but we had already done the advertising and printed up boxes with the name ‘Arena.’ Someone came up with the idea that the Empire of Tamriel, because it was so violent, had been nicknamed the Arena. That explained, kinda awkwardly I guess, why there was no arena combat in a game named Arena.

“I think Vijay [Lakshman] was the guy who tacked on the subtitle ‘The Elder Scrolls.’ I don’t think he knew what the hell it meant any more than we did, but the opening voiceover was changed to “It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls…”

To be clear, this is not new news: it’s coming from an archived interview that’s 25 years old, and yes I’m sure some of you already knew this piece of trivia. But I’m always fascinated by moments of serendipity like this, where a pre-printed box and a change in the project’s nature led Bethesda’s developers to come up with the name of the series that the company would be built upon.