UPDATE: Target reached out for a comment on the rumor and noted it was made in error, with Target communications representative Lee Henderson saying:
“This is not a real product – we’re sorry for any confusion.”
Looks like you’ll have to keep pretending that Skyrim is set in the land of Westeros for now, which is good because you already know it’s a great game. Original story of what might’ve been follows below.
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Like most leaks worth taking notice of, this one begins with an errant posting by a retailer. In this case, Target set up a landing page for something called “Bethesda: Game of Thrones” which was noticed by an eagle-eyed member of NeoGaf. Obviously, the only thing one can infer from this is that Bethesda, the makers of Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4 and so many other wonderfully and annoyingly deep RPGs, is making a Game of Thrones game. The page is still up (view it here!), but we’ll put a screenshot below, just in case.
The marriage between Game of Thrones and the relatively similar Skyrim have been around for years now due to mods in the Steam Workshop. Fans continue to create armor sets and full questlines featuring characters from Westeros that can easily be plugged into their game. Rather than HBO and George R. R. Martin depend on an underwhelming product from a small studio (the Telltale games were okay), why not go to the masters of the genre and have Bethesda build out a digital world of Westeros?
Of course, the various plots in the A Song of Ice and Fire series are locked-in to the canon. There’s no way the open-ended nature of Bethesda’s RPGs would directly translate to the plot of the current HBO series or any known thread that’s been laid out in Martin’s other works (like Dunk and Egg). This would have to take place in a time period and locations that would ensure your random killing of royalty wouldn’t send ripples through the timeline rendering Jon Snow’s grandparents dead in a hail of arrows to the knee.
(Via ComicBook)