Brandon Sanderson told IGN Spain this week that he's eager to see his novels adapted into video games, and that he already has a clear idea of where he'd start. He didn't say a version exists yet — just that the wish is there, and that it's specific enough to have a starting point. That's worth pausing on, because most epic fantasy worlds never get asked that question at all: not "would a studio buy this," but "does this world even have the shape a game needs?"
Why the wish, not the deal, is the interesting part
A statement like Sanderson's isn't news about a product. It's a data point about how the author himself sees his own worldbuilding: as something built with enough internal structure that turning it into an interactive system doesn't sound absurd. Plenty of acclaimed fantasy novels would make terrible games — not because the writing is weak, but because nothing in them behaves like a rule a player could learn. The fact that an author can picture where a game adaptation would even begin says something concrete about how that world is put together.
Three things a fantasy world needs before "video game" makes sense
Strip away licensing, budgets, and studios, and there are three structural questions that decide whether a world is game-shaped at all:
Does the magic behave like a mechanic, or like a mood? A magic system with fixed costs, limits, and consequences translates almost directly into gameplay — mana bars, cooldowns, trade-offs are just a video game's word for a well-built magic system. A magic system that exists mainly to feel awe-inspiring, with no consistent rule underneath, has nothing for a designer to build on.
Is the geography made of distinct places, or one continuous backdrop? Games need levels, zones, biomes — places a player can be told apart and remember. A world built as a single sprawling landmass with no internal boundaries is much harder to carve into anything playable than a world already organized into regions with their own identity.
Do the threats have names, or are they just "the danger"? A game needs bosses — specific, nameable opponents tied to a place and a stake. A vague, ambient sense of doom is powerful on the page and nearly useless in a design document.
Where this shows up in world-building outside big franchises
None of this is exclusive to authors with the reach of a Sanderson. It's the same discipline that goes into any world built with enough internal rules to hold together on its own — which is exactly the design problem Drakhthar was built to solve without a studio or a publisher behind it. Its thirteen regions each hold their own identity, and each is bound to one dragon and one Named character, so the land and the person are always the same story told from two angles — the kind of pairing that gives every region a distinct shape rather than being scenery. The Codex on drakhthar.com works the same way a game's bestiary or codex would: a structured reference a reader can consult region by region, rather than a single unbroken narrative. None of that means an adaptation is being planned — it means the same instinct that makes Sanderson's answer interesting is the same instinct worth building into any world from day one, self-published or not.
What to take from this if you're building your own world
Sanderson's comment is a reminder, not a blueprint: a video game adaptation was never really about fame or budget first — it's about whether the world was built with enough internal structure to survive being handed to someone else's system. Before wondering if your own fantasy world "could be a game," ask the three plainer questions first: does the magic behave like a rule, does the map behave like a set of places, and do the threats have names. A world that already answers yes to those has done the hard part, whatever medium it ends up in.