Bethesda Turned Down Offer to Work on A Song of Ice and Fire Title

While we already know that Cyanide Studios are working on a role-playing game based on George R. R. Martin’s series of novels, it’s worth noting that, according to Todd Howard apparently told EGM in an, as-of-yet unpublished, interview, Bethesda itself got really close to developing a title based on the series but ultimately refused because they wanted to work on their IP:

(With A Song of Ice and Fire, we went ‘˜We want to do that!’ People in our studio liked it, and it seeped in a bit to what we were doing,) Howard explained. (We were actually asked a while ago to turn those books into games.)

(…)

(We wanted to do our own world. That’s where we wanted to put out time into. Before we were even making Skyrim, there was a conversation with George R.R. Martin’s people. They thought it would be a good match and so did we, actually but then we thought about if that was where we wanted to spend our time. It was tempting, though.)

One has to wonder whether Bethesda’s huge do-what-you-want sandbox games would fit with Martin’s stories and world, but at the very least, it would have been interesting.