George R. R. Martin’s best-selling A Song of Fire and Ice is coming to our gaming fingertips real soon now, some gamers are a little surprised that the fantasy series has been translated into – of all things – an RTS, and not, say… a massive, beautiful RPG.

Now, Todd Howard from Bethesda Softworks has revealed that his company actually turned down the opportunity to turn the Game of Thrones series into a video game – and it’s all Skyrim’s fault.

A story in the upcoming EGMi: The Digital Magazine reveals that Bethesda was approached to make the official games based on the novels years ago – and the company, all “big fans” of the franchise – were thisclose to taking up the challenge.

“With A Song of Ice and Fire, we went ‘We want to do that!’,” says Howard. “People in our studio liked it, and it seeped in a bit to what we were doing.”

But there was one problem – the soon-to-be created Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

“We wanted to do our own world. That’s where we wanted to put out time into. Before we were even making Skyrim, there was a conversation with George R.R. Martin’s people. They thought it would be a good match—and so did we, actually—but then we thought about if that was where we wanted to spend our time. It was tempting, though.”

With Skyrim very nearly in our hot little hands, and the television adaptation A Game of Thrones doing ridiculous things for the success of the novels, we can’t help but hope that Bethesda has an opportunity to revisit the proposal. Who else really would do those characters justice? Bioware? You busy?