The Elder Scrolls’ Creators Reveal How Accidental Plagiarism Was Part of Its Origin Story

ign.com:

Names like Skyrim and Morrowind are so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget they were once ideas on a whiteboard. But in 1993, the world of Elder Scrolls was still very much a blank slate.

“People would wander into the office and write a name on the map. 50 percent were original. Some they thought were original,” remembered Ted Peterson, who was one of the designers on The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

Little did the Bethesda team know that they had accidentally cribbed the Morrowind name from Terry Brooks, then a popular fantasy author. Brooks had invented the name “Morrowindl” for the Shannara books. Years later, Morrowind would become a beloved RPG of its own.

“We weren’t ripping anything off on purpose. Nowadays you’d run everything through a lawyer,” Peterson shrugged.

Peterson and programmer Julian LeFay were witness to the very early days of Bethesda; back when it was still a publisher known for games like Wayne Gretzky Hockey — before Elder Scrolls was a franchise worth billions of dollars. In a talk at GDC 2024, they shared stories from those days and how one of the role-playing genre’s most renowned games first came to be.

Peterson had been at Bethesda for about a year when he began work on Arena. The project was conceived as an action-adventure game that saw a party of four travel to a series of arenas before confronting an evil wizard. It was not meant to be an RPG — that space was seen as too competitive for a tiny publisher like Bethesda. The somewhat confusing final title was a holdover from that original concept.

“That really wasn’t a very good title. Not the one we wanted,” LeFay admitted.

Over the course of a protracted and admittedly fraught development process, the Arena gradually transformed into a role-playing game, and the concepts that would define the rest of the series began to take shape. The party of four was winnowed down to one, the world began to come together, and a vast number of procedurally-generated towns were created — an early example of the