RPG veteran studio Bethesda is currently enjoying a new round of praise following the release of Starfield’s Free Lanes update, a not-so-game-changing overhaul that does undoubtedly improve the experience of the studio’s most-maligned title yet.
As one of the main forces behind the Western RPG genre, Bethesda has been a prominent part of gaming culture for decades, but former head of publishing Pete Hines claims that the studio wasn’t “legit” until the release of 2011’s Skyrim.
Speaking to Fireside Chat, Hines, who left Bethesda in 2023 after spending 24 years at the company. The head of publishing claims that “in the early days, Bethesda was the most mom-and-pop operation around,” and while the release of Morrowind was large enough to bring the company back from the brink of death, it wasn’t until Skyrim that the studio was seen as a big hitter.
“Everybody played Skyrim – that was the thing that made us feel like we’ve arrived, we are legit.”
Former Bethesda publishing boss Pete Hines
“The holy sh*t moment was actually Skyim,” Hines claims. “Morrowind allowed us to stay in business, like it was a really big hit, but it was a really big hit at a moment that, truth be told, we were in some trouble. We really needed a hit.”
While The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 were also really big hits, Skyrim’s release hit like few games ever do. To this day, tens of thousands of players play Skyrim—even base game Skyrim—every single day, and Hines explains that the game turned Bethesda from a decently-liked developer to a beloved one.
“Morrowind bought us a grace period,” he says. “Then Oblivion [did the same]. Credit to Todd Howard, who said, ‘I am not just going to turn around and spit out another one of these in two years and put it out on the same console.’ He saw an opportunity that the next thing was going to go really big, and he really wanted to embrace that. We could be a poster child for what next gen graphics look like [with Oblivion].”
“Everybody played Skyrim – that was the thing that made us feel like we’ve arrived, we are legit,” he continues. “You have to be concerned about us if you think you’re going to win Game of the Year. You have to take us seriously now. We have broken out role-playing games into a whole huge group of people who have never played an RPG before, but played Skyrim because it just looked like fun.”
While Skyrim may have broken the door down for Bethesda to bring the fantasy RPG genre to gamers everywhere, some would argue that the studio’s work on Fallout 3 is actually what turned them into a household name. While Oblivion was a big hit, even bigger than Morrowind, Fallout 3 was a colossal success for the time, and after Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 have been even bigger hits.
Right now, Bethesda is hard at work on The Elder Scrolls 6, the extremely-long-awaited successor to Skyrim as well as additional support for Starfield and Fallout 76. Expected to be Todd Howard’s last entry in the long-running fantasy series, everyone is hoping that the studio pulls out all of the stops for the upcoming RPG.
