All Your History: Bethesda Part 1 – The Open World

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By 1986, nobody accused Christopher Weaver of being an underachiever.  After working on high-end technologies in the labs of MIT, he went on to both NBC and ABC, before becoming the chief engineer to the House Subcommittee on Communications.  What was left to do but found his own company?  So he started Media Technolgies.  But because he clearly hadn’t done enough with his life yet, he started another company not long after.  This time, he wanted to see if the PC gaming market was ready to make that next technological leap into better, more realistic games.  He was in Bethesda, Maryland, at the time, so he thought long and hard, and then named his company: Bethesda Softworks.  Ironically, while their first few years were filled with sports titles, over the years they would become defined by some of the most sprawling fantasy epics in gaming history, covering everything from medieval magic to the radioactive future.  In the process, they have expanded and acquired some of the most storied developers in the world, to emerge as one of the most powerful forces in gaming today.

-The Open World-

Under Weaver’s supervision, the first game from the new studio was a football game, but one that would make use of Weaver’s scientific background.  Up to that time, sports games just used statistical models to determine whether, for example, a receiver would complete a pass.  By contrast, Bethesda’s self-published Gridiron! would simulate actual physics, including mass and velocity, to determine how far the ball would go.  Of course, since computers weren’t very powerful in the mid-80s, the trade-off for modeling real-time physics was dirt simple graphics.  Players were represented by dots.

Still, it was impressive enough to gain some attention, and was considered a success for the young startup.  So good was their buzz, that they got a call from one of the rising superstars in the industry.  Electronic Arts was trying to break into the sports world big-time, and they’d already signed up legendary commentator John Madden to lend his name to the title.  Now, EA wanted Weaver’s physics tech in the very first John Madden Football.  As a part of the deal, EA would also publish new Gridiron games, so Bethesda happily agreed.

Unfortunately, after EA had incorporated Bethesda’s physics into their engine, they suddenly lost interest in releasing another, competing football series.  In other words, Gridiron was left out to dry.  Feeling betrayed, Bethesda sued the publisher for $7 million.  While the result of this suit was never publicly disclosed, what is known is that Bethesda never worked with EA again, and Madden went on to be one of the single most profitable video game franchises in history.  So it goes.

In the meantime, Bethesda continued with the sports genre with Wayne Gretzky Hockey and a sequel.  They also started branching out into licensed territory.  To start, in 1990 they made the first video game based on a tiny independent film that was gaining a cult following: The Terminator.  Aside from being the future cyborg’s first game, it was also Bethesda’s first DOS game.  The title allowed the player to shoot people from a first-person perspective, a very early entrant into the genre that Doom would conquer three years later.  Afterwards came a number of licensed games, including Home Alone and Where’s Waldo, which were published by THQ.  Other than these games, the ambitious Bethesda chose to self-publish all their work, including a slew of new Terminator titles.

Also in 1990, Bethesda left Bethesda.  The company moved from their namesake city and went next door to Rockville, Maryland.  But the studio chose to keep its name anyway.

But amidst all the licensed and sports titles, Bethesda wanted to try and make something of their own.  Ironically, most of Bethesda’s staff were never really interested in sports to begin with; they’d rather be playing Dungeons & Dragons or the computer game Ultima Underworld.  So when they began their new venture, they combined their knowledge of making competitive sports titles with their interest in fantasy.  Arena was going to be a gladiator combat game, in which the player would slowly build up a team to tour the world’s stadiums in battles to the death.  But as the game progressed, they decided it needed more context, so they threw in a story.  And to flesh out the game a bit, they threw in some side-quests you could do between tournaments.  Before they knew it, the story and the side-quests started getting more in depth and more fun to play.  Eventually, the tournament was dropped altogether, and almost by accident, Bethesda had a first-person RPG on its hands.

And it was a whopper.  The world of Arena was absolutely gigantic, one of the biggest ever put in a video game.  Of course, the Bethesda team cheated a bit.  While each city in the game was hand-crafted by the designers, the landscapes around the cities were randomly generated.  This meant that every time a player walked outside a city, he would discover an entirely new set of pathways and dungeons to explore.  Items, monsters, and encounters would always be new and different — without the designers having to custom-build it all.  What this meant was that, even though the game wasn’t wildly different from the Ultima series, it painted its canvas on a grander scale.

Given all that, it was clear to the team that the original name, Arena, didn’t fit anymore.  Unfortunately, Bethesda had already done quite a bit of marketing for the game under that title.  As a compromise, the game was renamed to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the idea being that the world was so full of danger, the entire place was one big arena.  But the name wouldn’t be the only marketing promise to become a problem.  Bethesda had promised retailers that the game would be ready by Christmas 1993.  It wasn’t.

Sadly, when the game did finally hit shelves in March 1994, it was initially met by slow sales.  Gamers found that it wasn’t the medieval gladiator game they’d been promised, and worse, the opening dungeon was so brutally difficult that many gamers never made it to the outside world.  However, those players that did make it outside found one of the richest, most satisfying RPGs ever produced.  The gigantic world, fantastic art, and solid story made for an adventure that a player could sink dozens of hours into with no end in sight.  And everybody could play it their own way.  A player could stick to the story, or just wander around; charge right into the enemy, or sneak around him; amass huge wealth, or live as a hermit.  Whichever fantasy a player had always wanted to act out, Arena could provide.

The strong word of mouth kept the game alive, and in the end, the title became an underground sensation.  To their own surprise, The Elder Scrolls franchise looked like it might have a future after all.  Since this was their first home-grown franchise, and the one the team were most proud of, it was a fantastic turn of events.

Incidentally, though Arena was primarily sold on floppy disk, the game was also released onto CD-ROM.  Helping test this CD version for bugs was Bethesda’s newest hire, a young wannabe game-maker, named Todd Howard.

While another team at Bethesda went off and finished the cyberspace combat game Delta V, Howard went on to lead production on the company’s newest Terminator game, Future Shock.  This was the first title to use Bethesda’s home-built engine, called XnGine.  Releasing in 1995, it was one of the first true-3D polygon engines in the industry, a technique that would be popularized a year later by id Software’s Quake.  Howard went on to produce Future Shock’s expansion pack, which evolved into the full sequel SkyNET in 1996.

But good as the Terminator had been to the company, The Elder Scrolls was their crown jewel.  Now armed with their own engine as well, the company was ready to make the biggest and most ambitious games in their history.  Little did they know that their passion projects would nearly sink the studio for good.

Tune in next time to see Bethesda buckle under its own weight.

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