Pete Hines Fallout Boy

Oxm speaks with the vice president of bethesda softworks about how the studio became one of the most creative and consistent publishers of this generation.

- Tom Stone

Bethesda Softworks have been around since 1986 and seem to get more ambitious every year. After giving us two of the most acclaimed games of the last generation (Fallout 3 and Skyrim), they’ve since acquired developers that gave us Xbox One favorites Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Evil Within and this year’s Doom. We talked to the studio’s vice president, Pete Hines, about how they expanded, and asked the secret to realizing a great idea’s potential.

Ten years ago, people might have seen Bethesda as being just ‘the RPG guys’. now you’ve become this huge pantheon of creativity with a lot of unique, quite risky projects for a company of your size. Where did that come from?

I think Bethesda were known as the RPG guys mostly because, rightfully so, the best and most accessible stuff we’d done was The Elder Scrolls. Then that evolved into The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. But even then we were trying to work on different things with developers we thought had an interesting take or were doing something a little different. Obviously they didn’t all achieve the same level of success as Bethesda Game Studios had done. But when you talk about what id Software did with Doom, or Machine Games rebooting and giving a fresh take on Wolfenstein, or Shinji [Mikami] starting a studio with Tango and kind of going almost old-school with The Evil Within... I think we’ve tried to find and work with developers who buy into that same basic philosophy, which is that we want to do things that have a different take or try something new. Things that aren’t just saying, “Well everyone’s doing X, so we’re going to do X too.” And you’re now seeing the continuing maturation and execution of that idea.