After 29 years, a lost Easter egg in Bethesda’s forgotten Elder Scrolls spin-off has been uncovered
By (Image credit: Bethesda/GOG)
The Elder Scrolls only began to achieve widespread acclaim between the launches of Morrowind and Oblivion, yet Bethesda was eager to develop the series into a franchise well prior to that moment. The 1997 debut of An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is seldom talked about today, but it has concealed a secret for over 29 years. Today, The Strong National Museum of Play has revealed the curtain on a mysterious Easter egg that has remained undiscovered for decades.
If you’re not acquainted with Battlespire, it’s fundamentally a linear dungeon crawler situated within the realm of the Elder Scrolls. It remains a first-person title that preserves much of the intricate RPG combat that characterized Arena and Daggerfall, merely within a far more limited environment. The creation of Battlespire was spearheaded by the “father of The Elder Scrolls,” Julian LeFay, who passed away in 2025.
As noted on the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki, gamers have been aware for a while that there exists an Easter egg in Battlespire featuring a photograph of a few members of the development team. “It is currently unknown how to trigger this Easter egg or whether it actually operates in the final version of the game,” laments the UESP wiki. Nevertheless, the enigma has now been unraveled thanks to The Strong Museum, which has recently acquired a collection of documents that belonged to LeFay.
On the cusp of Bethesda’s 40th Anniversary, a preview of The Strong Museum’s Julian LeFay papers explores an Easter egg from An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire that has eluded discovery for more than 29 years.
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As detailed in a Bluesky video by Strong director Andrew Borman, if you enter the game and press down the number 1 on your keyboard while typing the word “spire,” the developer photo will appear on the screen along with the message “Battlespire rules!”
The extent to which Battlespire is excellent is somewhat debatable, as it garnered average reviews upon its release and was jointly credited – along with Redguard – as the onset of a downturn for Bethesda that the studio only managed to overcome with the triumph of Morrowind.
