Elder Scrolls - Arena

In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its award-winning RPG series, The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda Softworks has released the full version of the original Elder Scrolls game - The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

Arena started, as the name might suggest, as a medieval-style gladiator game. You had a team of fighters and went around the world fighting other teams in each city's arena until you became grand champion in the Imperial City.

The world used for Arena was Tamriel, the fantasy world created by a few members of the staff for use in their weekly D&D campaign. During development of Arena, more and more RPG elements were added -- what if you could walk around these cities? What if you could take your team into a dungeon? And soon it was clear what Arena needed to be -- a full-blown RPG.

Inspired by such games as Ultima Underworld and the unheralded Legends of Valour, Arena was now seen as a massive first-person RPG -- the game that recreated the pen-and-paper RPG experience -- be who you want and do what you want. For a long time Arena was a party-based game, where you lead a group of adventurers. This style of play proved less fun in first person, so Arena became a single character game.

Arena was to be the first chapter in an ongoing series of games, so the series took its name from Tamriel's mystical tomes of knowledge that told of its past, present, and future -- The Elder Scrolls.

Note
To run this game on newer systems, you will need to download an emulation program, a link to which is also available by following the Download tab above.