It's easy to forget now, but the first Elder Scrolls game had a rough launch back in the day: 'It was a disaster in a lot of ways and somehow built a billion-dollar franchise'

Given the legacy it created, it's easy to forget The Elder Scrolls wasn't a big deal right out of the gate. The original game in the series, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, wasn't badly received—our reviewer, Andy Butcher, gave it an 87 in his review at the time—but it didn't set the world on fire immediately.

In a retrospective on the making of Daggerfall over at Time Extension, Ted Peterson, designer on both the first two Elder Scrolls games, recalled the trouble Arena had moving copies when it first arrived on shelves in 1994.

"Game stores ordered a certain number of copies," he said, "and when we didn't ship on time, they started cancelling. To give you some context of how badly it did, the very, very first game I ever worked on was a retail pack for Terminator 2029, so you had to own the original game. That shipped more copies than Arena did early on. But we were lucky: word of mouth got out, and people starte...