Design lead on the first Elder Scrolls fondly recalls the days when Bethesda would finish a game, then the team would 'assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun' to get it shipped
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."
This was of course long before the days of widespread digital distribution, when PC games were shipped in those lovely big cardboard boxes and had to sell themselves to players on store shelves. And because Bethesda self-published Arena, it had to take care of that whole physical side itself.
"We even spent time shrink-wrapping the games ourselves, as Bethesda was the publisher and developer," says Lakshman. "We were in the loading dock and we learned how to assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun. Talk about seeing a product through from concept to box wrap! We did it all."
Arena was also late, thanks to the initial idea of an action game based around a tournament morphing over development into more of an RPG. "Eventually during the development, the tournaments became less important," recalled writer and designer Ted Peterson in 2001. "We eventually dropped the whole tournament idea altogether, and just focused on the quests and the dungeon-delving.
"At the end of development, we missed our Christmas deadline, which is really serious for a small developer/publisher like Bethesda Softworks. We released in the doldrums of March, which is disastrous. That, coupled with the fact that the distributors discovered we had essentially not made the arena combat game we said we were making, meant we initially shipped something like 3,000 units of the game."
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."
Best cozy games: Relaxed gaming
Best anime games: Animation-inspired
Best JRPGs: Classics and beyond
Best cyberpunk games: Techno futures
Best gacha games: Freemium fanatics