Video game industry veteran Julian LeFay, known by many as the “Father of The Elder Scrolls,” is stepping away from the industry due to his ailing health.
LeFay co-founded the independent game developer OnceLost Games with other former Bethesda developers in 2019, and the team has been working on a new RPG called The Wayward Realms. LeFay has been fighting a battle with cancer for the past several years, producer Victor Villarreal said in a video. “He has fought bravely and strongly, but it seems he doesn’t have very much time left,” he said.
Villarreal said LeFay has chosen to leave the game studio to spend time with his family and loved ones. He added that the studio had been preparing for LeFay to eventually leave the company, adding that LeFay made his “visions for the game” very clear to the studio. The team will “work tirelessly to bring that vision to life,” Villarreal said.
OnceLost CEO Ted Peterson shared a statement about LeFay, speaking to their personal and professional lives together. Peterson said he met LeFay back in 1992 when he interviewed for a junior writer position at Bethesda. “I had never been in a game development company before, and when I left Julian said, ‘If you get the job, you have to lose the suit.’ Julian himself struck an eccentric figure. Very tall and slender, scruffily handsome with a default scowl, and the most magnificent pompadour mullet in history,” Peterson said.
Peterson said LeFay is a big fan of pen-and-paper role-playing games, adding that what would eventually become The Elder Scrolls: Arena was “his dream project.”
As for the new game Wayward Realms, Peterson said it began with a conversation he had with LeFay “several years ago” when LeFay was reflecting on the first Elder Scrolls games and how he might approach them differently today–with his decades of experience–while retaining the same core philosophies.
“Afterwards, we talked about what I would do with design and narrative given my own years of experience on other games and other media like TV, and we decided to give it a shot together,” Peterson said.
Peterson said LeFay has been “courageously battling cancer,” but that his doctors are now saying “his time with us is limited,” which is why he is stepping away.
“Julian must step away from OnceLost Games for his health and to live his final moments surrounded by his loved ones. Julian has complete faith in the ability of the team to bring the game he has envisioned to life for this incredible community,” Peterson said. “Your words of support mean more than you know, not just to Julian, but to all of us who have been privileged to work alongside him. Obviously, the team has already had a chance to say goodbye and give their individual messages, and I sat by his hospital bed, reading them to him. In that case, I was reading them out loud and Julian was giving me dictation to reply back, which is rather hard to do through my tears.”
LeFay has amassed 36 credits on 21 games, including the first Elder Scrolls titles, Wayne Gretzky Hockey, The Terminator 2029, Dragon’s Lair, and Where’s Waldo. He left Bethesda in 1998.
A medieval fantasy RPG, The Wayward Realms is a spiritual successor to The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall that aims to make use of “old-school” design philosophies combined with the newest technology thanks to Unreal Engine 5. The game is planned for Steam Early Access but doesn’t have a release date yet.
