Rumor: George R. R. Martin collaborates on FromSoftware’s next game

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Some rumors are born from a stray sentence and grow until they become the topic of the week. In May 2019, George R. R. Martin, author of the books of the saga A Song of Ice and Fire, which inspired Game of Thrones, mentioned in a post on his blog that he was collaborating on a game developed in Japan. He gave no name, genre or studio, and said nothing more about the subject.

That was enough for the internet to connect the dots. A source who said they were familiar with FromSoftware’s projects claimed the game was from the studio behind Dark Souls and Sekiro, that it had the working title “GR” and that it had been in development for more than three years. According to that account, it would be an open-world game with horses to cross the map, and the announcement would happen at Microsoft’s E3 conference, scheduled for June 9, 2019. At the time, none of this had official confirmation.

What came next

The rumor hit the mark. On 9 June 2019, during the Xbox presentation at E3, FromSoftware revealed Elden Ring, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, with George R. R. Martin in charge of building the world and mythology behind the story. And the horse really existed: Torrent, the spectral steed that carries the player across the Lands Between, an open world divided into six main regions.

What stands out is how the game surpassed any expectation from that rumor. Elden Ring came out on 25 February 2022 for PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, sold 13.4 million copies by the end of March 2022 and reached 30 million in April 2025, joining the list of the best-selling games of all time. It won several Game of the Year awards, including the top prize at The Game Awards 2022. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion arrived on 20 June 2024 and passed 10 million copies, and the multiplayer spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign came out in 2025. A lovely detail: the partnership between a fantasy writer and a Japanese studio, which looked like a forum rumor, became one of the most celebrated worlds of the decade.