Bethesda Softworks is an American video game publisher based in Rockville, Maryland. It was founded in 1986 by Christopher Weaver in Bethesda, Maryland. The company has a long history of PC and console games, it has created e few genre defining games and it is worldwide known as one of the major video games publisher and developer.¹

History

As already said, Bethesda Softworks was founded in 1986 by Christopher S. Weaver in the small town of Bethesda, Maryland. Company's president Vlatko Andonov recalls that originally it should have been called Softworks, but the name was already taken: So, our founder, sitting at his kitchen table in Bethesda decided after laborious thought to add Bethesda to Softworks and there you have it!²

The company began its illustrious career with the physics-based sports games. The first was Gridiron!, a football simulator for Amiga and Atari ST personal computers. Their work was so impressive that Bethesda found itself party to an offer from Trip Hawkins, then President of rival Electronic Arts, to become an affiliate in designing a new series of football games, John Madden Football. While the success in such a venture was obvious, the company chose to take their on way in games developing.

Their approach to the market consisted in partially concentrating their development on the genre of roleplaying games: Ted Peterson, a former Bethesda developer declared that they were working on what supposed to be an "action game with a little bit of role-playing on the side". In fact in 1994 The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released and became a cult hit to RPG fans.³

Games

Gridiron!

In 1986 Bethesda Software released their first game: Gridiron! football simulator, ugly even for 1986's standards. The players were rapresented by 22 dots and the rest of graphics was not much more elaborated.

The goal of the game was to appear real, but rather to simulate real life football physics. The dots had, for the first time in sports gaming, true physics: it means that stronger players could break the tackles of smaller ones, and a running back breaking a tackle would "bounce" off his defender just like he would in real life.

This kind of simulation was never seen before at the time, and the idea was so innovative that Gridiron! easily became a success, winning a 1987 Family Computing Award.⁴

Wayne Gretzky Hockey

Wayne Gretzky Hockey is another sport game, this time ice-hockey themed, published by Bethesda Softworks in 1988. In 1 January 1989, a version for DOS system was released.⁵

Terminator

A series of games developed for DOS between 1990 and 1995. It was the first officially licensed game based on the Terminator film series. This allowed Bethesda to sublicense the film's rights for the console versions. The game reproduce a real part of Los Angeles: roughly from Beverly Drive to Central Ave, and from Mulholland Drive to National Blvd. The streets and their layout are largely accurate and it also includes some landmarks, such as Dodger Stadium, Griffith Park, and the Silver Lake Reservoir.⁶

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

In 1994 Bethesda released the first game of the series that made it worldwide famous and redefined the genre of role-playing video games. Like its sequels the game is played from a first-person perspective. One of the peculiarities is a very large world: players may explore outside cities into the wild, where they may find inns, farms, small towns, dungeons, and other places of interest. The terrain is randomly generated and several hundred towns, dungeons, and NPCs are available.⁷

The game's release was disastrous. Bethesda missed their Christmas 1993 deadline and the misleading packaging further contributed to distributor distaste for the game, leading to an initial distribution of only 3,000 units. When the game was launched, it was initially very buggy, indeed it was very difficult if not impossible to complete the main quest in the original, non-patched version of the game. Bethesda released a number of patches to fix almost all the glitches, making the game finish-able and more stable.⁸