An Elder Scrolls game on a cellphone? It sounds like painting landscapes on rice grains. The most famous roleplaying games (RPGs) in Bethesda Softworks' bestselling PC-based fantasy series - Morrowind, Daggerfall, and the upcoming Oblivion - are sprawling, open-ended extravaganzas so big you need a Lonely Planet guide.

Yet, here they are: Stormhold and Dawnstar, Java- and BREW-based Elder Scrolls games that run on dozens of different handsets, and Shadowkey for the N-Gage. Your jaw will drop: On a screen the size of a Federal Duck Stamp, they're first-person-

perspective RPGs with attractive art (by Elder Scrolls artist Mark Jones), multiple character classes, lots of quests, and dozens of detailed dungeon levels full of monsters and loot. Like bonsai sequoias growing on an end table or toy poodles that can sit in a coffee mug, the three ultra-miniaturized mobile RPGs in this Elder Scrolls: Travels series embody obsessive attention, a master's skill, and a crazed urge to do the impossible. Who pulled it off?

"If it's hard, I have to know if I can do it," says Greg Gorden, who designed all three games working freelance with Vir2L Entertainment. "RPGs are the biggest challenge on mobile platforms. At the time we started doing the Travels games, there were no first-person phone games. They're just beginning to come out with some now. With a lot of handheld games, you can burn through them in 45 minutes; they may be highly replayable, but you're not seeing any new content. But there's no such thing as a 45-minute console RPG. You

have to give roleplayers generally twice as much as you do for an arcade game and 50 percent more than a strategy game, because that's the expectation of the market."

In the Travels games, Gorden and Vir2L give the market a concentrated, crack-like essence of Elder: the trademark first-person view, the feel of open-ended adventure, plenty of quests, and a world to explore. "Elder Scrolls games really play with the sense of scale," Gorden observes. "Things can be vast, things can be cramped. That's hard to do on a mobile phone. For that approach, Shadowkey was the most successful. We had stuff that felt crampy, stuff that felt large. The world seemed absolutely huge. That one was the most successful in bringing the entire world alive."

Players like them all - and not just hardcore Scrolls fans, either. "Mobile games typically have a shelf life about one third as long as a PC title," Gorden says. "You're doing well if your game is still available after six months. You can still buy these Travels games after two years. At this point we're bringing some new people in."