IV. Scenes and Story Telling
In September 1993, the French Joystick magazine printed an article about Arena, including a few rare pictures. First of all this photo:
It shows Jeff Perryman working on a background photo for the story. The models used, were from his and Kenneth Mayfield's Warhammer collection. He and Ken were collector's of miniatures and you can find these every now and then in the game. For example the popular "DIE"-shield is still owned by Jeff.
The little studio for the shootings was set up in the basement and even some of the ingame animations were shot as stop-motion down there. Thanks to the frequently changing details of the game's story, the team was kept busy.
Another great deal of artwork for the game was painted by David Lee Anderson, as the Codex Scientia (Arena Guide) tells us. These were scene illustrations, mostly used for building interiors. As seen on the screenshots in chapter 3, interior spaces weren't implemented as dungeons, instead they were hand drawn scenes, possibly with some animations. As the scenes were later replaced with dungeons, almost none of them appear in the final game. Instead they can be found in the Manual, Codex Scientia, the French article from 9/93, as distant building sprites ingame and the story screens of the main quest dungeons. Seven scene images were used as illustrations of the Elder Scrolls ingame books published with the Oblivion Codex on the official Elder Scrolls website. The artwork for the Halls of the Colossus was published on the official Elder Scrolls Facebook page. The artwork showing an Arena was also used on page 56 of the Daggerfall manual. The following is a gallery of these images:
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