Dragons and Vaults: How Bethesda Built Two of Gaming's Biggest Worlds
The Elder Scrolls began as a gladiator game. Fallout began at another company. Together they made Bethesda the king of open-world RPGs, and in 2026 both series have big news.
In the early 1990s, a small American company called Bethesda Softworks started work on a medieval gladiator game. Players would fight their way through arenas around a fantasy empire. Somewhere along the way, the team got more interested in the world outside the arenas than the fights inside. The game kept its name, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, but became a role-playing game.
It launched on March 25, 1994. Three decades later, The Elder Scrolls has sold more than 90 million copies, and Bethesda also owns Fallout, a series it did not create but transformed. On July 17, 2026, Bethesda confirmed **remasters of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, a new Fallout project from Obsidian and that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, while most of its main studio works on The Elder Scrolls VI**.
From Arena to Skyrim
Arena missed its Christmas 1993 target, but it established the idea that defines the series: a huge world where you can go anywhere and be anyone. Daggerfall (September 1996) took that to an extreme. Its world was designed to be about the size of Great Britain, with around 15,000 towns and 750,000 inhabitants, most of them generated by computer.
Morrowind (May 1, 2002 on PC, followed by Xbox in June) traded size for a strange, hand-built island with giant mushrooms and alien politics, and brought the series to consoles. Oblivion (March 21, 2006) made it a mainstream hit on Xbox 360 and PC, with a voiced world and a famous opening in a prison cell.
Then came Skyrim on November 11, 2011, a date fans still call 11/11/11. Its snowy Nordic province, dragons and shouts made it one of the defining games of its decade. It has sold around 60 million copies and been re-released so many times, from the Special Edition in 2016 to VR in 2017, that it has become a running joke among fans.
Fallout: the series Bethesda bought
Fallout started at Interplay Entertainment. The original Fallout, created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky and developed by Black Isle Studios, came out on October 10, 1997. It was a spiritual successor to Interplay's Wasteland (1988): a darkly funny, turn-based RPG set after a nuclear war, in a world that looked like 1950s America's idea of the future.
After Fallout 2 (1998), Interplay sold the franchise to Bethesda, and a 2012 legal settlement gave Bethesda the remaining rights. Bethesda turned Fallout into a first-person open world. Fallout 3 (October 28, 2008) scored up to 93 on Metacritic, the series' highest. Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas (October 19, 2010), still many fans' favourite, and Bethesda followed with Fallout 4 (November 10, 2015). The online Fallout 76 (November 14, 2018) had a rough launch and the series' lowest scores, 49 to 53, but has been rebuilt with years of updates.
The biggest boost came from television. Amazon's Fallout series premiered on April 10, 2024, its second season on December 16, 2025, and a third has been ordered.
2026: two remasters, a sequel and a long wait
The July 2026 roadmap, published less than two weeks after major Xbox layoffs, was the clearest look in years at Bethesda's plans. Besides the two remasters and the Obsidian project, Fallout 76 gets a Raven Rock expansion in 2027, a prequel to Fallout 3, and ZeniMax Online Studios will work closely with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls.
And The Elder Scrolls VI? It was first shown at E3 2018. In March 2026, studio director Todd Howard told IGN that builds of the game "are consistently working every day". No release date has been announced.
Why it matters
Bethesda's worlds shaped what players expect from open-world RPGs: pick a direction, find a cave, lose an evening. Fallout's TV success also proved that a game world can carry a prestige drama.
WGC's take: the remasters are welcome, but the real test is still Elder Scrolls VI. Eight years after its teaser, it is the most anticipated game Bethesda has never released.
What to play next: Skyrim Special Edition and Oblivion Remastered on PC, PS5 and Xbox are the best way into Tamriel. For the wasteland, Fallout 4 is the easiest start, and New Vegas the best story.