Bethesda turned down chance to make A Song of Ice and Fire videogames to work on Skyrim

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels tells a sprawling, epic story with dozens of locations, tons of threads, and hundreds of characters. HBO has had enormous success adapting it for TV with Game of Thrones, but it’s had to cut out massive chunks (bye, Aegon Targaryen; bye, Quentyn Martell) to get it down to a reasonable size. The ship has sailed at this point, but if George R.R. Martin had to do it over again, might he turn his property over to, say, a company known for making sprawling role-playing computer games rather than a venerated TV studio?

Apparently, his “people” thought of that, according to an article in VG24. The article is old, but it tells a fascinating story: years before Game of Thrones debuted on HBO, “George R.R. Martin’s people” talked with employees at Bethesda Softworks, the company responsible for the long-running series of Elder Scroll videogames. “They thought it would be a good match—and so did we, actually,” said Bethesda designer Todd Howard. The Elder Scrolls games are known for their detailed, sword-and-sorcery-style fantasy worlds and open-ended gameplay, so it makes sense that the people at Bethesda would be attracted to Martin’s work.

"With A Song of Ice and Fire, we went ‘We want to do that!’ People in our studio liked it, and it seeped in a bit to what we were doing."

But at the end of the day, Bethesda decided to dive into making The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim instead. That game that has gone on to sell an estimated 22.7 million copies, so it’s hard to claim that the company made the wrong call, as “tempting” as the prospect of a Song of Ice and Fire game was. “We wanted to do our own world,” Howard said. “That’s where we wanted to put out time into.”

Game of Thrones was eventually turned into a series of episodic adventure games by Telltale, but a videogame adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire from scratch never happened. Of course, there’s no prohibition on Bethesda potentially doing something in the future, and it wouldn’t be the first time a series of novels had been adapted as a videogame. For example, CD Projekt RED has had great success with its The Witcher series, which are based on author Andrzej Sapkowski’s books. And with the end of the HBO series in sight, it wouldn’t be crazy to look for other tie-in opportunities.