mirawind

Please consider helping this kiddo get the treatment she needs!

i mean yes he’s going to be the first to get a solo movie but

You might have seen this image. It lives on several sites as the supposed logo to a game called Elder Scrolls Adventures: The Eye of Argonia.

Eye of Argonia was intended to be the first sequel to the 1998 ESA: Redguard, and would have featured Cyrus’ hunt for the titular artifact. Redguard did not sell well however, despite great critical reception, and all sequels were scrapped by the financially troubled Bethesda.

One thing immediately stands out: the logo in question is for Argonia, sans “Eye of.” The tagline (“and a hero from haerot will save them,” written in Daedric) also does not seem to match what we know about the game. Cyrus is not a hero that goes around saving people, and “Haerot” is not any place we know of in TES. My best guess is that it is a reference to Heorot, the great mead hall in Beowulf, which would have had a similar pronunciation. 

The logo itself uses two fonts: the Daedric font (for the subtitle) and a font named Abbadon for the main body. Abbadon was created in 1995, so it is possible for the logo to have been contemporary with whatever short brainstorming cycle Eye of Argonia had prior to its cancellation.

Since image has never been featured by Bethesda, and since we know of no game simply called “Argonia,” it’s easy to dismiss it as a fan creation.

This is where the story gets really interesting.

A user named ElderScrollsMatthew on @uesp‘s forums pointed out that the image actually came from an Oblivion fansite kit (thanks to Legoless for bringing this to my attention). It’s located, strangely enough, inside the Daedric font file, mapped to the 0 key. That same font was packaged on the Morrowind CD. You can download it here.

The font itself is a bit of a dead end. It says that it was created on January 22nd 2001 by someone named Adam Pyle. No such person is listed in Morrowind’s credits, however. It is possible that he was a contractor or part of Bethesda’s west coast branch, E-Nexus (a.k.a. “Zenimax Los Angeles”), which helped with Morrowind at the end of its development cycle, or that the creation of the font was outsourced to an external company. 

The logos for Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard, and Morrowind are there as well, mapped to 1-5 respectively. Judging by the distortion, these icons look to be livetraced from very small logos of each game. The Argonia logo is no different in that regard, but is much clearer than the other logos. This says two things to me: either the source image was much larger, or it was much more graphic in nature (like, for example, just a typed out word without any special shading).

(A comparison between the icon logo, in red, and the Abbadon font, in blue)

(A comparison of the Morrowind logo and the logo icon provided in the Daedric font)

In an attempt to get a definitive answer, I showed the image to Michael Kirkbride and Pete Hines. Michael was with Bethesda between 1996 and 2000, and was one of the chief people working on Redguard (and its sequels) as well as the art director on Morrowind. He was with E-Nexus between 2000 and 2001, and helped to ship Morrowind while there. Pete joined Bethesda in 1999 and has worked in PR and marketing since then, most recently as VP of both. Neither one of them had ever seen the image, nor did they know that it had been released by Bethesda.

That leaves us with a logo for a game that we’ve never heard of, embedded in a font file created by someone who is never again mentioned in relation to Bethesda, created without the knowledge and included without the approval of at least two chief developers.