I ******* love George R.R. Martin's
A Song of Ice and Fire book series. I love it so much that my Twitter handle is
@seven_hells, a direct reference to the series, and whenever I get the chance to create custom character names while gaming, I got straight to the
ASoIaF well. In other words, I've become a total
ASoIaF geek. Now I'll admit, I only learned about it through HBO's awesome
ASoIaF-based series,
Game of Thrones, but that's only because I've never been a fan of fantasy fiction. Elves, trolls, and wizard shooting magic out of their fingers never appealed to me. The only reason I became interested in the series at all is because it was on HBO, and I'm an avowed cable-TV snob. But neither
Game of Thrones nor
ASoIaF traffics in such high-fantasy nonsense. In fact, it's closer to a medieval political drama with elements of horror than the high fantasy seen in The Lord of the Rings. There are no elves, the only dwarfs are human, magic is largely a thing of the past, but when it is used, it's dangerous, scary, and never used without great sacrifice; also, the mystical creatures are either straight-up monsters or presented in the darkest manner possible.
A Song of Ice and Fire is also ripe for videogame adaptation, and I'm not talking about Cyanide's
A Game of Thrones: Genesis RTS, either. I'm talking about the full Euro-North American RPG treatment that only the likes of BioWare, Bethesda, or the makers of the
Witcher series, CD Project RED could pull off (and I'm sure there are others I'm can't think of right now). So imagine my disappointment when I came across
this article today on
VG24/7.com. In short,
Bethesda toyed with the idea of an Elder Scrolls-style
A Song of Ice and Fire adaptation, but ultimately turned GRRM's people down because they wanted to do
Skyrim instead. ****. You know that feeling you get when you find out you were oh-so-close to getting the thing you want most in the world, only to have it snatched away before you even knew it existed? I'm feeling that right now. Of course there are still rumors that Cyanide is working on a
GoT RPG, but I'll believe it when I see it.
In the meantime, I'll just console myself with the novels.
