Trivia / The Elder Scrolls: Arena

• Common Knowledge: While it's often claimed that Tamriel is based on based in the developers' homebrew Dungeons & Dragons setting, several former employees have stated that it was actually made specifically for the game, though bits and pieces of it were taken from their various D&D campaigns.
• Descended Creator: The ghost of Ria Silmaine is played by Jennifer Pratt, one of the programmers.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Was the case until Bethesda released it on their website as a free download in 2004, making it Rescued. However, you have to download a DOS emulator to actually play the game and Bethesda assumes you know this already. (GOG.com would later give it away for free including a DOS emulator to anyone who purchased another Bethesda game.)
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: See What Could Have Been below.
• Milestone Celebration: Bethesda released the game as freeware in 2004, ten years after its original release.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Despite countless rumors throughout the past two decades suggesting otherwise, you can't actually walk from one major city to another, as the game's world is infinite and procedurally generated. No matter how far the player travels through the wilderness, the game will always consider them to be in the vicinity of the last city they were in. In order to successfully move to another area, they will have to use fast travel.
• What Could Have Been: The big one is that the game was originally conceived of as literally an arena battle simulator; that's why it's called Arena. You'd take your team around Tamriel's various cities, fighting in arena combat and making a name for yourself in places. Quite a bit of the files for this are still buried in the code for the game that shipped, but during development, the early team at Bethesda fell in love with the tools they developed for expanding the wider world and decided instead to make an RPG where you'd be able to wander freely across a massive, open world. Even then, they spent a while designing the game with the intention of it still being a party-based RPG rather than having the player control a single character as they do in the finished product.
  • Console ports of Arena were planned for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation 1, but for some reason never materialized.
• Word of God: According to Arena designer Ted Peterson, it is likely that any creature featured in this game that didn't return in a later installment (e.g. Lizard Men, Fire Daemons, etc.) were brought to Tamriel by Jagar Tharn's magic to wreak havoc during his reign.