Julian LeFay, known by the games industry as the ‘Father of The Elder Scrolls,’ has passed away at age 59 due to cancer.
LeFay died on June 22nd, 2025, less than one week after leaving the industry due to such health concerns.
Julian LeFay’s Impact on The Elder Scrolls
LeFay was Chief Engineer at Bethesda during its early years, serving as a top influence in the development of the first two Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, as well as the Battlespire spin-off.
While he left Bethesda during the earlier years of Morrowind’s development, Bethesda has immortalized LeFay in their games via the character Julianos, the God of Wisdom and Logic.
LeFay largely contributed to Morrowind’s 3D techniques before leaving, but didn’t have much of a say on the game’s design.
LeFay’s Later Projects
LeFay went on to work on other projects over the years, but perhaps most notable was his co-founding of indie game studio OnceLost Games with fellow former Bethesda developers Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman.
Shortly after its formation, OnceLost announced The Wayward Realms in 2021, a game inspired by Daggerfall’s procedurally generated open-world rather than focusing on a hand-crafted world like Bethesda’s later The Elder Scrolls titles, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
The Wayward Realms was successfully Kickstarted on June 29, 2024, with users pledging just over $800,000 to fund the game’s early access development.
According to a Reddit Ask Me Anything LeFay held around eight years ago, he reveals that procedural generation is his go-to when it comes to massive worlds:
“Treat with that level of respect and invest effort and, more importantly, thought into it and you can achieve wonderful things. You must direct the randomness to produce what you want, what you would have created, had you an army of graphic artists.”
While there’s no release date for The Wayward Realms just yet, you can wishlist the game on Steam.
Its latest developer update is from April 30th, where OnceLost Games detailed progress on its art and writing.
Some highlights:
- Finalized all base early access melee weaponry for each culture
- Finished narratives for faction questlines
- Began connecting and rigging facial animation systems
- Fully modeled, rigged and animated a new flying enemy type and a new giant enemy type
We’ll have to see how The Wayward Realms holds up to The Elder Scrolls’ earliest projects. It may be a good way to wait out The Elder Scrolls 6, and its seemingly endless development time.
