How long must we wait for a truly great Game of Thrones video game?
Why have digital adaptations of Westeros fallen short?
My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Nathanael Peacock. Nathanael is a writer, writor and regular contributor at Quest Daily. You can find and follow him on Bluesky and X.
Editor’s note - It’s been a few months since Nathanael and I chatted for this piece. During that time, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad was released and Game of Thrones: War for Westeros was officially announced. I’m particularly excited about the latter but naturally this meant that we didn’t have a lot to say about either.
Fergus: Dragons are back bay-bee! With HBO's House of the Dragon a certified hit and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms due to hit small screens in 2026, it's clear that audiences are far from done with Westeros.
Despite that, the gaming landscape isn't exactly littered with games based on George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Aside from the usual deluge of mobile-centric licensed titles that accompanies any pop culture behemoth of its size, the last major one was Telltale’s episodic take on the saga back in 2014.
My memories of this one are actually fairly positive. It was no Tales from The Borderlands, but then again what is. While it did have that weird and uncanny spin-off quality, with the story centering on a Stark-like family who get dragged into the events of Game of Thrones and cross paths with a variety of characters from the HBO series, some of whom even feature the original actor returning to reprise their voice roles. Given how much of the six-episode run was spent setting everything in motion, I’m so curious where things would have gone had Telltale not imploded before it could tackle a said-to-be-planned second season.
In the decade since, all that ASOIAF fans have had to chew on has been the odd indie-led adaptation, such as Reigns: Game of Thrones or Game of Thrones: Beyond The Wall. I can’t help but notice the contrast between this desert and the deluge of Lord of The Rings video games that came out back when Tolkien’s fantasy saga was at its zenith of popularity. What gives?
Nathanael: Too true Fergus! I just rewatched the Game of Thrones: Kingsroad trailer that was shown at The Game Awards earlier this month. It looks flashy to be sure, but as with many of your mentions above, it's a mobile game - which is bound to turn some folks off. Rewatching the trailer I really wasn't sure what the gameplay is going to be in the end. Maybe choice-driven with QuickTime events akin to the Telltale series? Surely it won't be a fully-fledged action game on mobile titles. But the fight scenes surely had me hankering for some good, cinematic combat.
I've always felt that the problem with ASOIAF game adaptations is one of player expectation and player fantasy. Basically, as a book and show series, there are so many different ways a game can approach it - you could go full empire management and build something like Crusader Kings (There's a sweet ASOIAF mod for that on the Steam Workshop). Or you could lean hard into the combat and life fantasy of the Seven Kingdoms and make something like Kingdom Come or The Witcher. Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord bridges that gap a little, and has a ASOIAF mod on the Workshop as well.
What I'm getting at is that we've never had a game that spans all aspects of the Game of Thrones world, whether an official title or just something with those sweet low-fantasy gritty vibes. And with a world as broad and varied as GoT, show fans and book fans will approach a game with different expectations. Some might want to play politics and pit the Houses against one another like Cersei or Daenerys, while others want the medieval combat fantasy of playing Jon Snow or Sandor Clegane.
Personally, I still play Reigns: Game of Thrones occasionally when I'm traveling. The decision-making and empire management scratch a very particular itch in my brain. I've also played a good deal of the Crusader Kings 3 and Mount and Blade 2 mods, and both give a little bit of that GoT feeling, and are astoundingly detailed passion projects from independent teams. But in the official gaming space, I've yet to find something that scratches that itch.
Are there any other games you've played (not necessarily official GoT tie-ins) that give you ASOIAF vibes?
Fergus: I think you’re right in that one of the core things that draw people to the world of ASOIAF is that duality between smaller individual actors in a gritty low fantasy setting and more sweeping stuff happening on a larger geopolitical stage. Addressing both ends of that spectrum is tricky and there aren’t that many examples of what that specific combination can look like in modern video games.
Weird as it might sound, my first instinct here is to gesture at tactical RPGs like Fire Emblem or even X-COM. Although the set dressing here is worlds apart from Martin’s medieval fantasy world, I think that the different layers of strategy game you’re juggling and the interest in permadeath as a mechanic feel more in line with that source material than some of the other Game of Thrones games have been.
If we expand our search for ASOIAF vibes to the realm of board games, the top of mind choice for me is The King’s Dilemma. This cooperative legacy game of kingdom management sees players take on a role akin to Westeros’ small council and make both big and small decisions that tilt the course of the future for the better or worse. There’s a pretty decent digital adaptation of the game out there and – much like Reigns – The King’s Dilemma is exactly the kind of evocative “leadership simulator” that’s very easy to imagine being remixed to incorporate the likes of the Lannisters and Baratheons.
If we’re playing the wish fulfillment game, I’d love to see a proper Total War game set in Westeros or a lavish adaptation of CMON’s A Song of Ice and Fire miniatures game. However, when you put the modern realities of game development alongside Warner Bros desire to be a bigger player in the gaming space, an outcome closer to what has happened to the Warhammer license over the past decade seems more likely than the glut of Lord of the Rings games that came out of the early 2000s.
Nathanael: Very true. There's something interesting about the individual power fantasy of the characters in Martin's books. The balance of very high stakes with huge rewards makes it captivating. You get the idea that almost anyone could potentially end up very powerful, if not on the throne themselves. You only need to look at Petyr Baelish or Davos Seaworth to see how self-made men can gain power in the world. While at the same time, inherently powerful people like Renley Baratheon and Viserys Targareon are brought low (spoilers).
Those stakes are incredibly difficult to portray in a gaming sense, where you want the challenge to feel surmountable, even if steep. I love the idea of Fire Emblem in a Game of Thrones world, it balances that player to NPC connection well, and permadeath keeps the stakes up. Similarly, the Persona games with their emphasis on interpersonal relationships could provide a strong basis. I've heard the same of Metaphor: ReFantasio, but haven't tackled that yet myself.
While I was at PAX this year, I spoke to the developers of Good Society; A Jane Austen RPG - now this one may be a stretch but stick with me. The game centers around these events where you socialise with other players, send letters and gallivant about town. But beneath it all are bitter family rivalries, social ladder climbing and the ever-present threat of besmirching someone's good name. Say you took that base, and instead of the players vying for the most populous hand at the next ball, you're instead trading battalions to be sent to the wall, pledging allegiance to the next in line to the throne and spreading rumours to have other players assassinated. Sounds like one hell of a night to me, and similar to your thought about King's Dilemma, it keeps the story open to be determined by the players, and different every time.
But then again, if we're leaning less social and more combat, Dynasty Warriors has always been a guilty pleasure of mine and wiping out 10,000 Lannister soldiers at the Battle of Blackwater Bay sure sounds like a good time to me.
Fergus: I think it says something that we can think of tons of easy fits for one specific half of the equation when it comes to adapting ASOIAF. It’s simple to draw a line between the violent feudal warfare aspects of the source material and video games because there is an abundance of games that explore or express that specific strain of fantasy in different forms, be it Fire Emblem or Total War or Kingdom Come.
By comparison, there aren’t nearly so many games that deal with the more nuanced stuff around diplomacy or court intrigue. I’m not looking to make the case that it’s impossible (for instance, Solium Infernum has a really nifty diplomacy system that I could easily see working in a Westeros grand strategy game) but that this part of the license is as critical as it is thorny.
The world of ASOIAF is always going to be harder to adapt in a digital form because to strip the backroom politicking down into something more mechanical, accessible or systematized comes with the risk of robbing it of the dramatic juice that makes it so compelling. TTRPGs like Good Society are a better fit for adapting that side of the license because they are flexible enough to play in that grey area and video game development can all too often flow down the path of least resistance and in the opposite direction.
Given Warner Bros commitment to making Game of Thrones its next Harry Potter, I’m sure the future will bring with it new adaptations of ASOIAF. However, until the license ends up in the hands of a developer willing to play the game of thrones on Martin’s terms, I truly don’t know if we’ll likely see anything other than pretenders to the crown.