Bethesda made it official on November 3, 2026: the next Elder Scrolls game is called The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. The reveal came in a video message from Todd Howard to mark the studio’s 40th anniversary, according to IGN. But the company behind Skyrim did not start with dragons. Its first game was about American football.
A football game built at home
Christopher Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks on June 28, 1986, working out of his house in Bethesda, Maryland, and funding it himself with roughly $100,000.
The idea for the first game came from his lead programmer, Ed Fletcher, a football fan. Weaver had no interest in the sport, but he knew physics.
The result was Gridiron!, released in 1986 for the Amiga and Atari ST computers. On screen, the players were just dots seen from above. Under the hood, it did something new: the plays ran on real physics. As Kotaku explained, heavier and stronger players could break tackles from smaller ones, and a running back bounced off defenders the way he would on a real field.
How Gridiron! ended up next to Madden
That engine caught the eye of Electronic Arts, which had been working on a football game with John Madden since 1984. EA agreed to market and distribute Gridiron! in exchange for Bethesda helping develop that licensed title.
Weaver told The Escapist in 2007 that EA was so impressed with the game that it “hired us to develop the first John Madden Football.”
The partnership did not last. In June 1988, Bethesda sued EA for $7.3 million, claiming the publisher had stopped releasing Gridiron! while folding many of its elements into Madden. John Madden Football came out that same year. The case was settled out of court, and the terms were never made public.
Six sports games before the first Elder Scrolls
Gridiron! sold nearly 20,000 copies by 1989, and Weaver later credited it with putting Bethesda on the map. Sports kept the young studio going: six of the first 10 games it developed were sports simulations, according to The Escapist. The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first chapter of the series, did not arrive until 1994.
Forty years later, Madden is EA’s yearly NFL game, and Skyrim is still Bethesda Game Studios’ most played game, the company told IGN. Sentinel, for now, has a name and a logo, but no release date.
Next time you call a play in Madden, remember the dots that ran on physics first in 1986.
