I played about two hours ofGame of Thrones: Kingsroadbefore realising something fundamental: I just don’t care about this anymore. I haven’t for many years now.
Most people turned on the show hard following its widely disappointing final season, and though there’s buzz aroundHouse of the Dragon, it’s a far less significant cultural force. The first novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series began in 1996, and following the HBO adaptation in 2011, the next eight years saw an incredibly popular run for the TV show. Up until then, the biggest high fantasy series had beenThe Lord of the Rings, with medieval fantasy very much being a more niche, nerdy thing, so suddenly seeing parents and grandparents worldwide cheering on battles with castles and dragons was refreshing, if jarring.
But in all those years, I - alongside many others - would dream of a large-scale game set in Westeros, letting us loose to live out ourGame of Thronesfantasies on another level. But 2025? Yeah, maybe not.
Even The Quality Feels Like It Belongs In 2015
Don’t get me wrong, Kingsroad is solid. It’s well-made as far as the foundations of a video game go, and as a free-to-play title that’s also available on mobile platforms, it’s beautiful. But for an action RPG, it certainly doesn’t push any boundaries that have been set in the last ten years, which only makes me further believe this game should have been in our hands way back when.
That’s not to say that this game would stand against the giants of gaming in 2015 - that year gave usFallout 4,Bloodborne, and evenThe Witcher 3. Even if this exact product launched alongside those titles, it would have had a rough time standing out. But it wouldn’t have succeeded because it did anything better - it would have succeeded because it was Game of Thrones, and by default, it would invite the attention of so much more than just the gaming community - especially when those fans of the show could have downloaded this game on their phones and iPads (albiet on much less impressive 2015 tech).
The World Was Ready Then, But Is Past It Now
Not unlike how Animal Crossing: New Horizons united the world amidst a global pandemic, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad could have had similar, if less significantly important, popularity on a global scale, had it launched while the whole world was invested in the political intricacies of these fantasy kingdoms.
If a game like this, as solid-though-unimpressive as it is,hadreleased during the peak years of Game of Thrones’ popularity, it could have been one of the biggest games in the world. Millions of people who were already fans of the series would have flocked to it, and the retrospective success of the series up until 2019 could have carried it so much further, evolving it into something much bigger as time went on.
In 2025, though, six years after Game of Thrones has been bitterly left behind by those same global fans, it just feels like a glimpse of something that we once dreamt of, a pocket of potential missed, but something we no longer really want.
