General:Alan Nanes' Posts

Alan Nanes' Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Alan Nanes

These are a few notable comments from Alan Nanes, senior game designer at Bethesda Softworks, on The Elder Scrolls setting. These comments were originally archived by The Imperial Library.

2006

On Mysterious Akavir (2006-06-15)

Much of the lore from Mysterious Akavir is from the scrolls and works of Tosh Raka, the "Tiger-Dragon" who was revered as a divine in Akavir. There was a time when the tiger-beings (of Ka Po'Tun) and the snake-beings (of Po Tun) were at war. The snake-beings had already consumed all of the humans for fear they would someday take over their land, but cleverly, the tiger-beings kept a hidden force of servitor humans to help defend them. After the dust settled, there was still a viable force of human warriors (the precursors to the Blades) whose decedents later on were used in the invasion of Tamriel. This led to the remains of the warriors at Pale Pass.

We created the lore, and you can take this as "fact".

2021

Autobio (2021-06-03)

When I'm not playing boardgames or video games, I spend my days as a video game developer for Bethesda Game Studios in Rockville, Maryland. I began my stint as a Quality Assurance Associate on several titles including: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal, The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For Morrowind: Game of the Year Edition I moved up in the world and was made Quality Assurance Lead. After that project wrapped Executive Producer Todd Howard took a chance on me (likely due to my incessant nagging and barrage of quest scenarios waved in his face) and bestowed me the title of a Game Designer. I cut my teeth in this field on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and several of its Downloadable Content Addons (my claim to fame is designing the Vile Lair and Wizard's Tower DLC in particular). After the Oblivion DLC wrapped, I was placed on Fallout 3 where I was a Game Designer on part of the Main Quest and a huge swath of Misc. Quests. Fallout 3 shipped in October of 2008 and the team moved on to Downloadable Content Addons. I was fortunate enough to work on several of these projects such as Operation: Anchorage and I was the Lead Designer on Broken Steel. I've been very fortunate to work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which shipped in 2011, authoring the Thieves Guild questline and the city of Riften. I spent most of 2012 working on the DLC for Skyrim, Dawnguard and Dragonborn. In 2013, I began working on Fallout 4, and ended up designing the Brotherhood of Steel questline as well as 2 of the companions: Cait and MacCready. In 2016, I was fortunate enough to become the lead designer for Nuka-World, the Fallout 4 DLC. My newest adventure was support writing on Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls: Blades. Beyond that, and who knows what the future holds?

I've been what I'd call a "serious" boardgamer for close to 20 years now thanks to my proximity to many other basement-dwellers who revel in moving bits of plastic across imaginary worldscapes and rolling dice to see when they die. My decent into the cardboard madness began with an innocent game of Risk 2210 and evolved into a sizable collection of games (much to my wife's chagrin) which now occupies a small room in my basement. My current favorite games are Imperial Assault and Mansions of Madness.