All Your History: Bethesda Part 2 – Overload

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When Christopher Weaver founded his own video game company in Bethesda, MD, he started off by making a number of sports games.  Bethesda Softworks’ Gridiron was the first football game to ever simulate real-world physics, a feature that has been emulated by the genre ever since.  Moving on into licensed territory, Bethesda next made the first games based on The Terminator.  At last, they turned to making their own original content.  To their own surprise, their gladiator combat game Arena quickly evolved into a first-person RPG, set in one of the largest worlds ever constructed for a video game. Strong word of mouth propelled The Elder Scrolls into a cult hit, and Bethesda finally had a franchise to call their own.  After building their own 3D engine, they got to work on a sequel that would be even more grandiose than its ambitious predecessor.  Beyond that, they were also planning to expand The Elder Scrolls into a broader franchise.  But they would find that their ambitions had gotten away from them, and as the 90s came to a close, Bethesda looked like it was headed for oblivion.

Overload

Bethesda self-published The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in August 1996.  The team had taken everything about the first game that audiences loved, and massively expanded on it.  The game world covered an area the size of Britain, with thousands of towns and hundreds of thousands of NPCs.  To help fill out this huge world, the small team, including quest designer Todd Howard, created an algorithm to randomly generate environments, dungeons, items, and monsters.  The end result was a game that a player could sink dozens, or even hundreds, of hours into without ever seeing it all.

The game’s story was also taken further than ever before.  This time, instead of a directed quest-line, it was a sprawling, non-linear campaign that had six different possible endings.  Of course, in true Elder Scrolls fashion, a player could always just ignore the main quest to go do one of the hundreds of side quests, or just explore the world, or raid dungeons, or anything else in a world that seemed to have no limits.  And as the player did so, she would discover that the abilities she was using were getting more powerful.  Daggerfall debuted a brand new leveling system.  Instead of the typical format of gaining experience points, and then spending those points on specific abilities, Daggerfall instead automatically leveled up whatever the player was using.  It was simple, intuitive, and natural, and became a standout feature of the series going forward.

However, the game also had its share of problems.  While its massive scale was impressive, it was also hard to fine-tune. In the end, based on the good name of the franchise and Daggerfall’s own strong points, the game went on to be the company’s biggest success to date.  The Elder Scrolls was now clearly Bethesda’s flagship franchise.

So the company now bet its future on the fantasy world of Tamriel.  After Daggerfall, not only did The Elder Scrolls III formally go into production, but two other Elder Scrolls games as well.  On top of that, more sports titles for bowling and drag racing were on the way, in addition to the science-fiction game 10^th Planet for the makers of the film Independence Day.  In other words, Bethesda’s ambitions got away from them.

And quality started to suffer.  In November 1997, the newest Elder Scrolls game released, and it was a completely different beast from the earlier titles.  An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire was a smaller-scale adventure, focused on combat.  The thinking was that the coolest part of their series was fighting monsters, so making a straight action game with linear levels would be more fun and appeal to more people.  Also, since the release of Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo a year earlier, it was clear that the action-RPG genre had a market.  But Battlespire still featured a solid story, and its dialogue was considered better than even Daggerfall.

Since the game was more focused, the team could afford to hand-craft the entire world.  No more randomly generated environments: everything from the wall decorations to the rocks would be intentionally placed.  This allowed the game to have a more purposeful design and a more artistic aesthetic.

On top of all that, Battlespire also had multiplayer for the first time in the series, allowing for both co-op play and competitive combat.  In other words, the game had an incredible feature set, and in theory should have been the best game Bethesda had ever produced.

Unfortunately, since the development team was split between Battlespire and all the other games Bethesda was working on, they didn’t have time to polish everything.  So when Battlespire hit store shelves, its genuinely good aspects were overshadowed by rampant bugs.  While the fans had put up with Daggerfall’s problems, they refused to do so a second time.  Burned gamers steered clear of the title, and Battlespire was not a success.

The cracks in the company were starting to show.  Money was running dry, The Elder Scrolls III was put on hold, and The 10^th Planet was cancelled for reasons never disclosed.  Still, the company did have another Elder Scrolls game coming out, and it was hoped that this game would prove the model that Battlespire had failed at.  The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard would also be an action game in a smaller world.  Redguard also introduced puzzles into the mix.  But though it once again received praise for a fun story in a great setting, it was faulted for clunky controls, lame graphics, and more bugs.  To top things off, it was a DOS game… that released in 1998, well after DOS had been replaced by Windows.  It was another commercial failure.  But at the same time, it was the first Elder Scrolls game made under the direction of Todd Howard.

By this point, Bethesda had driven itself into quicksand.  Close to bankruptcy, the development team had shrunk to about six people.  Then, out of nowhere, ZeniMax Media offered to buy the company and bail them out of their financial difficulties.  Therefore, ZeniMax — which was co-founded by Christopher Weaver — acquired Media Technologies — which was founded by Christopher Weaver — which owned Bethesda Softworks — which was founded by Christopher Weaver.  What a coincidence.  The influx of cash helped the studio for the immediate future, but if they didn’t release another big-seller soon, they would go under for good.

You might think that the bruised Bethesda would play it safe at this point, but instead, they decided to expand their business model.  In 1999 they for the first time published a game made by somebody else: Zero Critical, a 3D point-and-click adventure from Istvan Pely Productions.  Sadly, by 1999 the adventure genre was dead in the water, and the game went nowhere.  The next year saw another drag racing game that, again, didn’t lift the sagging company.

And the bad news was about to get a lot worse.  In late 2001, Weaver was ousted from ZeniMax by his own partners.  Weaver later sued them, claiming that his partners had bought his strong brands and then got rid of him.  However, the case was not deemed worthy of going to court, since he had illegally searched his former partners emails for information.  It was an unhappy end for Weaver; but as he still owned one third of the company, things weren’t all bad.

The company he left, however, was in dire straits.  Years since their last successful title, they needed to go big or go home.  So in a last desperate gamble, they bet the whole company on Howard and his next Elder Scrolls game, the full sequel that had been on hold for years.  It quickly became the biggest, and most expensive, project in the history of the company.  If it flopped, it would be the end of Bethesda.  But if by some miracle it actually sold, and sold well, it might just single-handedly save the company.

Tune in next time to see Bethesda craft a masterpiece.

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