We have now passed the days that adjustments to video games are flops that pass us by. HBO’s The Last of Us season 2 dominates the TV landscape, while Minecraft (love it or hate it) has been a huge family hit at the cash register.
Another TV title that hit gold in recent years had fallen from Amazon’s Prime Video Studios, in collaboration with Bethesda. Funny Because it was damn and brutal, this SCI-Fi-Show recorded exactly the right balance of references for fans of post-apocalyptic games, while also creating a new story that attracted a new audience.
Amazon
The approach to this huge and vast material gives me hope that Bethesda now has the experience to accept another franchise in the spirit of the times. Of course I talk about the Fantasy Game series, The Elder Scrolls.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered was announced today and released a week ago. In the first four days it gathered no less than four million downloads and counts – an incredible achievement that proves again what a dedicated fan base has this universe.
I was one of those players who tuned the stream and craved breath (while my husband laughed at me) for the visuals of the imperial city and emperor Uriel Septim VII, freshly updated for 2025. I also bought the title that same day … although unfortunately I could not play that evening that evening did not play the whole of the Xbox series.
But I have now clocked for a few hours in oblivion, and it has brought back some of the vast storylines that I know they deserve to enjoy non-gamers on the small screen. That said, more people have heard of the next game in the series, Skyrim of 2011 (which has been remarked on literally everything, including a bloody fridge), so this can also be a competition for a TV adjustment.
Anyway, an Elder Scrolls television series is a no-brainer, and I will give you three reasons why.
The huge world of Tamriel
While the Fallout of Prime Video is proponents of Steampunksteden in an abandoned landscape in California, an older TV series TV series offers something much fantastic that will appeal to franchises such as the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones -with not only landscapes and many Lorent dwellings.
Tamriel is a continent in the older roles, and both oblivion and Skyrim have been agreed in a province in this area.
Bethesda
The province of Oblivion of Cyrodiil, the house of the imperials, is diverse and lush. With the Regal Imperial City centered in the middle, the surrounding smaller cities each have their different personalities – from the picturesque streets of chorrol to the shady alleys of Bravil. In the meantime, the roads between filled with wild flowers and color are in abundance, something that would translate beautifully on the screen.
The Land Skyrim, inhabited by the Norden race, is not that attractive in my opinion, but it is still amazing in its own hard way. Think of robust mountains, snowy outdoor posts and a sky filled with alien colors thanks to the northern lights – and of course dragons fly over your head spontaneously.
Even if a hypothetical TV series was not a direct adjustment from Elder Scrolls IV or V, we know that there are many more countries to explore the junglass from Elsweyr, the home of the feline race of Khajiit, or the dunes of Hammerfell, the land of the Redguards. The institution is the oyster of a writer.
Hannah Cowton Barnes / Foundry
The moving guilds
Like many Elder Scrolls players, I am convinced that some of the best stories come from side -quests and guilds. In fact, I almost always postpone the most important missions in both oblivion and Skyrim because they cannot compare with the entertainment value that I get from other missions.
Each game has a striking guild story line, although both factions appear in most Elder Scrolls titles. For oblivion that is the Dark Brotherhood. Players are admitted to the guild of murderers as soon as they kill another character in cool blood – they then receive a mysterious visitor from the character Lucien Lachance, who invites them to become a member of a “fairly unique family”.
Missions for the brotherhood include organizing an accident by dropping a minotaur head on a character and a whodunnit, in which you are locked up in a house with a party of dinner guests and they secretly have to remove them one by one, turning them against each other.
In Skyrim, the Thieves Guild is particularly striking, with the Dragonborn recruited by Brynjolf and asked to commit a robbery in broad daylight. If they are successful, they join the hollow of robbers and pickpockets – but soon learn that there is a traitor in their midst that they have to discover.
Both guilds have characters and suddenly that would fit perfectly into a TV program – and again, there are many more to adapt, from magicians, to warriors, bars, and so on.
The meme power
Fallout’s sense of humor made sure that TV series stands out of the peloton, and the tongue-in-cheek style translates to the Elder Scrolls series, where a show could almost certainly create viral moments to attract a new audience.
Oblivion: Remastered lets a lot of those moments circulate. A perfect example is the admiring fan, a continuous wood eleven that you not only leave alone once you become champion of the Arena. Many players have tried to kill him in creative ways, but he is an essential NPC, so he continues to respond. He would be a brilliant cameo in an Elder Scrolls show.
There is also the Daedric Prince of Madness, Sheogorath, a key figure in the shivering islands expansion of oblivion and a beam of Singing in Skyrim. His irregular dialogue is something that my school friends and I still quote to this day.
For disposable one-liners that are easy to invade, there are the guards who patrol the countries. Most Elder Scrolls fans will know the one in Skyrim who says the expression: “I used to be an adventurer like you … Then I took an arrow to the knee.”
What I mentioned above is only a fraction of what an Elder Scrolls TV series could contain. In reality I am not sure how a showrunner would choose a setting, let alone a story to focus on – but the three perspectives in Fallout were a smart way to cover an extensive world, and I am confident that the source material in oblivion, Skyrim and other titles is strong enough to create an iconic show that will beat.
Bethesda -Baas Todd Howard told Last year that there were no plans at that time to make an Elder Scrolls show of film -he might be waiting for the right idea or script. And boy, I hope it does, because it could go into history.
