When did Bethesda become, you know, Bethesda? That is, when did it become one of those game companies whose every release becomes a ginormous public event? Morrowind? Oblivion? Fallout 3?
None of those, if you ask former Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines. In an interview with Firezide Chat, Hines said the studio’s first true “Holy shit” moment was Skyrim.
“Everybody played Skyrim—that was the thing that made us feel like we’ve arrived, we are legit,” recalled Hines. It was the moment when a Bethesda release became something other studios dread: “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.”
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My beloved Morrowind? A crucial game in the studio’s legacy, but not a world-striding colossus: “Morrowind allowed us to stay in business… [it] wasn’t some runaway success that, you know, everybody talked about”.
Only Oblivion, for Hines, almost reaches the lofty heights that Skyrim set, and in some ways set it up to hit it big with TES 5. “We were the consensus game of the year off of Oblivion,” says Hines.
“So Oblivion was like, we’re meant to be here. We are good enough to do this. It doesn’t matter how big we are, how big our competition is. We can do this. And we carried that belief into Skyrim.”
I’ll be honest, I kind of think of Oblivion as the game that took Bethesda from crunchy (and wonderful) RPG house to a studio that console makers wanted on their E3 stage, but I see where Hines is coming from. “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.”
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