1. Sex sells and the altered cover art
In January 1993 nobody was talking about Arena and in magazines you can't find any direct hint to the game. However in an article in Computer Gaming World you can see Ken Mayfield (Bethsoft's lead artist in these days) drawing a suspicious artwork.
On the picture you can see a woman wearing a cape and a gauntlet. Since Bethesda was only working on Delta V (A space simulation) and a Terminator game, the concept art can only belong to Arena. This example shows one of the marketing strategies bethsda is planning to use for Arena: Boobs. An article on Gamasutra.com discusses the cover of CGW issue 12/93, which shows the arena box cover, in very much detail. The cover shows the well known Arena box cover, that we will analyze in more detail now. In mid August 1993 Bethsoft published a slideshow that contains a promotional version of the cover art, that is dated to Mai 27th 1993. When comparing this picture to the retail version, you will notice some things:
First you'll see the images are mirrored (for better comparison I mirrored one, to make them both the same direction). You'll also see some more differences:
-The hand of the woman is slightly edited
-The Helm of the Barbarian is completely different
-The Barbarian has different shoulders
-The gem in the middle of the wizard's necklace is different
-A little ring at the neck of the legionaire has been removed
-The background is different
But the topic of hot women takes no end. Everybody knows that prostitues were planned for Daggerfall, but a screenshot from May 20th 1993 indicates the same for Arena.
The Global.bsa features some sprites titled as "babe"... (I couldn't convert them, yet, but the name says everything)
Another screenshot from May 20 shows a slave market featuring a nearly naked woman. (bottom left)
The first screenshot showing a character is dated to May 25, 1993.
Eye catcher of the picture is the beautiful Woodelf woman named Jehanna Khel. The name Jehanna may be a reference to the city Jehanna that is described as following in the old datafiles of arena:
"Jehanna, a city as beautiful as her name."
2. AD&D ?
Since the first slideshow was released in August 1993, it's hard to find earlier screenshots. Since the French always were something special for Bethesda, it seems like only french magazines featured screenshots before the slideshow was released. Three of them can be categorized as "may 20"-shots because they have no interface.
The first shot shows a typical illustration of Lord Bel or another Demon from Dungeons and Dragons.
The next screenshot shows another famous D&D creature that doesn't appear in the retail version: A Beholder. This creature is mentioned in more than half of the .inf files of the retail version.
The last screenshot shows an early version of the lich, that looks very different from the retail version.
Around this time (May/June 1993), a man named Nicholas Vargish applied for a job at Bethesda and got a little studio tour. Julian showed him the current version of Arena and in September '93 Nicholas made an usenet post about it. Nicholas wrote that Arena had reflections in puddles (did it have these in the retail version?!) and crashed very often. In a second post, he mentioned very nice weather effects. In an email, he explained to me that he had to code a rotating cube as test for the job, but then he decided not to try to join the company.
3. Gladiators, Team-Members and Stickmen
When reading through the old city descriptions of Arena, you'll notice that every city had a gladiator team waiting for you to challenge them. The same principle was planned for TES IV: Oblivion, which had a Arena in every city, too, but the idea was discarded during the development of the game. A french article tells us more about the story: the gladiator teams fight against eachother and the winner will get the throne that (for some reason) is threatened by demonic forces. From the beginning there always were dungeons for the player to explorere, to strengthen his characters before fighting other teams. Because fighting alone is boring, the player should be supported by a team of other characters. In the EXE of Arena you can find strings like "Team Leader" or "Team Member 2".
In an interview with Power Play in 1994, Vijay Lakshman revealed a list of features that were scrapped:
"We wanted to create a real "Arena", were players can fight against NPCs ad win gold and prizes. For example, we also wanted to include the option of playing via network and having a party, with bargaining, hiring, firing, etc. Of course we couldn't integrate all of this."
On four screenshots that are from around June 1993, we can see an early version of the party-interface:
The first picture shows the Crystal Tower on the Summerset Isles. Very special are the dragons flying around the tower and spitting fire.
The second screenshot might show the hideout of the party. In the GLOBAL.BSA you can find a "Start Game" screen, maybe showing the same building.
The third screenshot shows kind of a treasure chamber.
The fourth screenshot clearly shows a Tavern.
My theory for all these "scenes" is, that the game had a many hand drawn scenes for special places, that were later removed. More examples can be found in the manual of Arena:
The only ones that are still used today, are the ones for the main quest. For example the last two (in slightly different versions).
The Codex Scientia (Arena guide) also has many of them:
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .97806.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .70060.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .52598.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .85843.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .25733.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .94132.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .20197.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/ ... .85886.jpg
Some can be found as unused distant buildung sprites:
That the interface of this version was far from being finished isn't hard to see. The character names weren't displayed and some of the buttons were playceholders with little stickmen instead of "real" people.
On screenshots from August 10th 1993 we finally see the finished interface of the party-version. The placeholders are replaced, characters are displayed properly and some details of the interface were polished.
The first screenshot shows the Crystal Tower again, but this time the scene looks different: The dragons are positioned a bit lower and they don't spit fire.
The second screenshot shows that the bulk interface could be minimized to show more of the actual screen.
The journalist David Pipes described the party-based-fightin-system back in September 1993:
"It is a first-person perspective role- playing game, again with very good graphics and
sound, and a party to accompany the player. Players will control multiple characters in combat, in real time. They will be able to plan tactical actions and instruct the others to follow through, then watch it happen as they fight."
4. A little company and a lot of testers
In 1993 Bethesda was already well known, foremost for its hockey games, but still the company was quite small, as Vijay Lakshman described it in 1993:
"There are about 12 people. Six programmers, 2 designers and 4 artists. That's it. And of course various other
people who come and go on a part-time basis, just help out for specific projects."
Bethesda tried to make code as efficient as possible and so Arena was written in ~90% assembler code. A huge number of testers were hired to test games for Bethsoft 8 hours a day and to write bug list. The programmers would fix these bugs during the night and weekends.
Here is a photo of the Arena development team:
5. New concept, long delay and the beginning of faking
The original release date for Arena was in October 1993. In september 1993 David Pipes still reported of a party-based game. Around this time the beta test for Arena was very likely to be already running and maybe during this process the dev team noticed that the gladiator-theme was obsolete and the sidequests and dungeons were much more fun. So the release was delayed to 1994 and the game was changed drastically, by removing the gladiators and the party.
At this point something weird happened: The old slideshow screenshots looked cool and were selected by hand to be the best possible screenshots. the only porblem was, the interface was totally different from the new one. So Bethesda took the old screens and just copy-pasted the new interface on them. This process created 4 groups of screenshots:
-The original Slide show shots from August 1993 and earlier
-The new slideshow shots
-Demo-Fakes
-Ads and retail box
This screenshot exists in all 4 versions:
Top left original, top right Demo, bottom left new Slideshow and bottom right Ads/Box.
By moving the release of Arena to the next year, something funny happened with the title screen of Arena:
When looking closely, you can see that behind the copyright text, nearly the same text is written in black. Maybe they had to change it, because Bethesda wasn't "limited" anymore and the copyright year became 1994 instead of 1993.
6. Buttons that changed the world forever
The first slideshow featured two very interesting screenshots. One shows the map of Tamriel with all larger cities and the other one shows the map of Morrowind.
The map featured one more button than the retail version. Its use isn't known, but we know what it created:
When looking on the map of tamriel, you might notice that the city Daggerfall is located at the iliac bay instead of the ocean outside. On the ingame province map the city is outside. But why? It's very easy to understand when you imagine the fourth button. It would have covered the entire city making it unclickable. So the position of Daggerfall was changed. The correct location at the Iliac bay was used in TES II, but for the Oblivion codex maps, they used the wrong position.
The fourth button moved one more city and changed the landmass a bit. In Blackmarsh, the city Soulrest would have been covered like Daggerfall, so it was moved a bit to the north. When the Codex maps for oblivion were created, they looked at the Arena province maps and since the cape next to Soulrest was covered by the button the artist improvised and made it smaller because he couldn't see how far it should reach into the ocean.
7. Preview for upcoming attractions
In the Interview with Power Play that was already mentioned above, V.L. mentioned, that they knew from the beginning, that Arena would be the first part of a series.
Already in September 1993 Bethesda stated that there will be Addons and Campaign-Mods for Arena in 1994. When Daggerfall was announced in 1994, the planned release Date was January 1995 and Arena characters could be ported to Daggerfall. Both didn't happen. Daggerfall itself names its assets "Arena2".
A photo of the Daggerfall Dev Team:
) wouldn't understand it. Also, source code is very unlikely, since the testers got the compiled game to test. So only the programmers from Bethesda might possibly have it. The problem is, that Arena is freeware, not open source, and a french translation team wasn't allowed to change stuff in the exe of Arena for translation.
but where to start looking is the problem.
