In a new interview, the makers of Fallout: New Vegas have revealed that the studio was given the opportunity to make a game based on Game of Thrones – and they turned in down.
Talking to Eurogamer, Obsidian co-founder and chief executive Feargus Urquhart revealed that EA, through EA Partners, offered the company an opportunity to make a licensed game in 2005.
The studio was initially interested, with Urquhart being a big fan of the books at the time (the HBO series didn’t begin airing until 2011). But according to the terms offered at the time, Obsidian would have been required to do a prequel.
“The only thing we could have done is what BioWare did with Knights of the Old Republic,” Eurogamer quoted Urquhart as saying.
“They basically said Episodes 1-6, you can’t touch it, so we’re just going to go way back. But even then some stuff had already been written about it in the [Star Wars] Expanded Universe. With George R. R. Martin there was no other … they talked about some history … we could have done that.”
Urquhart, along with fellow Obsidian co-founder Chris Parker, added that the studio was more interested in doing an open-world RPG at the time. But the options available at the time felt more appropriate for a real-time strategy game, which wasn’t Obsidian’s speciality.
“We were starting to think more about open-world RPGs, and we wanted our players to have agency, to be important in the world,” Urquhart explained.
The full interview, which is well worth a read, can be found over at Eurogamer.
Update: Amended headline to read “Game of Thrones Game”, rather than “Game of Thrones RPG”.
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