Since fans of George R.R. Martin‘s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books discovered back in November of 2008 that HBO was pondering turning it into a new series called Game of Thrones, they have been buzzing with excitement. The only problem was that HBO was only ordering a single pilot episode to test the waters and see how the new show would play.

Since then, a great cast headlined by Sean Bean has been put together, and the aforementioned buzz has continued to grow and grow to a point where it was thought that HBO may just decide to give the thumbs up to an entire season without waiting for the completion of the pilot. This, thankfully, has turned out to be very true, as HBO has officially ordered nine new episodes. This now equals out to ten whole episodes, and the first season of Game of Thrones!

The plan for HBO is to take each book from the series and turn it into a season of the show. This of course will only happen if the first season is a success; but with the amount of excitement behind it already, the show would have to fail miserably as a whole not to have at least a fairly successful first run.

It’s becoming more popular for networks to take a shot in the dark on new shows based on little to no feedback. The new series currently airing on Starz, Spartacus, had an order for Season 2 before the maiden season even debuted. HBO also recently ordered a season of Boardwalk Empire, which has Martin Scorsese attached as the pilot director and series producer.

Now comes the waiting game. Production on Game of Thrones will begin in June, but the first season won’t debut until Spring of next year. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get to see the pilot episode early, in the same fashion that SyFy introduced us to Caprica.

[Source: THR]