VI. New concept, long delay
and the beginning of faking

The original release date for Arena was in October 1993. In September 1993 David Pipes still reported of a party-based game. Around this time the beta test for Arena was very likely to be already running and maybe during this process the dev team noticed that the gladiator-theme was obsolete and the sidequests and dungeons were much more fun. So the release was delayed to 1994 and the game was changed drastically, by removing the gladiators and the party.

At this point something weird happened: The old slideshow screenshots looked cool and were selected by hand to be the best possible screenshots. the only porblem was, the interface was totally different from the new one. So Bethesda took the old screens and just copy-pasted the new interface on them. This process created 4 groups of screenshots:

• The original Slide show shots from August 1993 and earlier
• The new slideshow shots
• Demo-Fakes
• Ads and retail box

By moving the release of Arena to the next year, something funny happened with the title screen of Arena:

Unedited title screen:

Edited:

When looking closely, you can see that behind the copyright text, nearly the same text is written in black. They probably had to change it, because the copyright year became 1994 instead of 1993.