Rare Arena artwork found in lossless quality

[MrFlibble]

I was browsing DiscMaster looking for Bethesda related stuff and stumbled upon this previously unknown slideshow pack: bethnew.zip

At first I thought that someone had just mashed together several known Bethesda slideshows (Arena, Terminator Rampage, Delta V) but I quickly noticed that it actually contains different pictures. In fact, a lot of the Arena related material was previously only known from magazine scans of varying quality:

The static interior images were likely intended to represent in-game locations like a tavern or an armoury, before it was decided to fully render building interiors in faux 3D like the rest of the game world. You can see the Daggerfall buckler on the armoury image.

The same package also contains unique screens from Rampage, and something from a few other games.

[SeaGtGruff]

Holy cow, those are wild!

At first I thought most of them must have been from some other game, until I started looking more closely at them one at a time. They really make you wonder what kind of game Arena would have been if they'd kept to their original concept rather than reworking it into the game that was finally released.

In the image with the flying dragons(!), you can see the four characters' resemblances to images that ended up in the released game.

Good catch on the Daggerfall buckler.

[SeaGtGruff]

I just realized that the picture with the two flying dragons is identical (minus the dragons) to the picture of the Crystal Tower. You can see that they clipped a little bit off of the right edge of the picture when they formatted it to fit inside the frame that Arena puts around all such dungeon pictures.