George R.R. Martin admits he isn’t really a video games guy, but apparently when Hidetaka Miyazaki and his fellow game designers approached him to work on the worldbuilding for Elden Ring, he found their pitch “too exciting to refuse.”
“Miyazaki and his team from FromSoftware were doing groundbreaking stuff with gorgeous art, and what they wanted from me was just a bit of worldbuilding: a deep, dark, resonant world to serve as a foundation for the game they planned to create,” Martin wrote in a blog post over the weekend. “And as it happens, I love creating worlds and writing imaginary history.”
Despite not being into video games broadly, Martin also admitted he used to play a few: Railroad Tycoon, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Master of Orion specifically. No word on whether he dabbled in other FromSoftware games, like Dark Souls, as research for Elden Ring.
Martin also reiterated that his contributions for Elden Ring were done years ago, saying that he essentially did his part before handing things off to FromSoftware in Japan. His portion of the work largely involved crafting the backstory and history for Elden Ring, and he did not have any direct involvement in writing dialogue or other specific text — that’s all being handled by Miyazaki. In fact, Martin is the reason that Elden Ring’s story will be more focused on characters and less abstract than other FromSoftware games.
Elden Ring is headed to PC, Xbox Series S and X, Xbox One, PS4, and PS5 on February 25, 2022.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
