George R.R. Martin is the author of the Song of Ice and Fire series, adapted by HBO as Game of Thrones. Famously, he has been working on the sixth book in his series, The Winds of Winter, for well over a decade; the last book in the franchise, A Dance With Dragons, came out way back in 2011.
Why is Martin taking so long? There's likely no one reason, but something fans have noticed is that Martin tends to take on other projects in addition to Winds. For instance, he helped the team at FromSoftware come up with the lore for Elden Ring, an epic fantasy video game where players explore a blasted landscape wrecked by an epic war between demigods. It definitely feels like something Martin contributed to.
“[W]hen they came to me, FromSoftware, they wanted the world," Martin told IGN. "They knew the action of Elden Ring that the players would get into would be in the ‘present.’ But something had created that present, had created that world. So where did that world come from? And I've done a lot of world building, most notably on Westeros and the backgrounds of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. And I like doing world building. So what had happened 5,000, 10,000 years before the current day action in Elden Ring that led them to that place? And I had some ideas about the magic and the runes. There was a lot about runes. And I worked it all out."
"It was interesting that the team flew in and we had a number of sessions and they would fly back and do their magic, and then they would come back here a couple months later and show me what they had, which was always amazing to see what they came up with."
Elden Ring went on to be a monster success; the DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, was one of the biggest hit games of 2024, and there's a multiplayer version called Elden Ring Nightreign coming out this year. FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has even contemplated making an Elden Ring movie if they could find a "very strong partner" to work with.
Martin has hinted before about the possibility of an Elden Ring movie, and he did it again when IGN asked him if he would help out with a sequel video game: “Well, I can't say too much about it, but there is some talk about making a movie out of Elden Ring,” Martin said. “We'll see if that [the Elden Ring movie] comes to pass and what the extent of my involvement was, I don't know.”
That said, Martin is mindful that he has a rather large monkey on his back preventing him from taking too many other projects: “I'm a few years behind with my latest book, so that also limits the amount of things that I can do.”
At this point, Martin's fans are used to waiting eternally for The Winds of Winter, but Martin keeps saying he's plugging away at it. If I had to guess which would come out first — and Elden Ring movie or The Winds of Winter — I'd give them about equal odds, which is to say I wouldn't expect either of them very soon.
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