HBO orders Targaryen Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon

A new Game of Thrones prequel is officially on the way. House of the Dragon, a Targaryen-focused prequel set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones, has officially been picked up to series by HBO. The announcement was made by Casey Bloys, the president of programming at HBO.

The series, which will start with a 10 episode season, is co-created by original A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal (Colony). Condal will serve alongside veteran Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik as House of the Dragon’s showrunners. Sapochnik, who directed some of the most acclaimed episodes of the original Game of Thrones series like “Battle of the Bastards,” will also direct House of the Dragon’s pilot episode as well as later episodes in the series.

The show will tell the story of House Targaryen and how it came to rule Westeros. House of the Dragon will be set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones, which means that it’s likely to take place around the time of Aegon the Conqueror the ruler who brought the seven kingdoms of Westeros together with the help of his dragon-riding warrior-princess sisters — who he was also married to.

The show will be based on Martin’s prequel novel Fire & Blood, which itself is a history of the Targaryen reign in Westeros. The first part of Fire & Blood, which was released last year, covered almost 140 years of Targaryen history. It’s unclear if the series will move the story along as quickly as the book, or focus on some the bigger events in Targaryen and Westerosi history in detail instead.

This announcement comes on the heels of the report that HBO would not be moving forward with Jane Goodman’s prequel show, which was supposed to focus on the Long Night. While the announcement of House of the Dragon certainly means that HBO isn’t done with Game of Thrones, it does seem that the network is being selective about which projects within the universe actually make it to series.