Bethesda Softworks

Company name and origins

Bethesda Softworks was founded by Christopher Weaver in Bethesda, Maryland in 1986 as a division of Media Technology Limited, an international engineering research and development firm founded by members of the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), of which Weaver was founder and CEO.

Christopher Weaver, company President Vlatko Andonov recalls, had originally wanted to call the company "Softworks", but found the name 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!"

The company's founder, Chris Weaver, had, by Arena's release, transformed the company from a committee-run organization to one run which had to follow "a single person's vision": his. "For 18 years," Weaver stated, "from 1981 through 1999, all the money that was invested in the company was my own." Prior to creating Bethesda, Weaver had worked at MIT on "speech parsers, graphic interface and synthesized worlds - what people now call virtual reality...bleeding edge stuff." He had worked in news broadcast directing at NBC and as the Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC, eventually becoming Chief Engineer to the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

He had created Bethesda "to see if the PC market was a viable place to develop games". The executive command and personal investment allotted to himself allowed the company to become, in Weaver's words, "a boutique house", a house which "kept rewriting rules and inventing new things." Weaver, in the opinion of journalist Joe Blancato, was a man "used to having good ideas.

1986–1994: Gridiron!, Electronic Arts lawsuit, The Elder Scrolls

Bethesda Softworks is credited with the creation of the first physics-based sports simulation, Gridiron!, in 1986 for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64/128. Early games scored respectably in the gaming press.

Electronic Arts was so impressed with Gridiron! that they hired Bethesda to develop the first John Madden Football. Bethesda eventually decided to sue EA in 1987 for USD$7.3 million, claiming that the company halted cross-console release of Gridiron! after incorporating many of its elements into their own Madden NFL.

In 1990, the company moved to Rockville, Maryland.

The company is best known for creating The Elder Scrolls RPG series, based upon the original programming of Julian Lefay. The first chapter of the series, entitled The Elder Scrolls: Arena, was released in 1994. Since that time, numerous other chapters have been released. Bethesda Softworks is also known for publishing titles based upon popular movie franchises, including The Terminator, Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean.

1994–1999: Company expansion

In 1995, Bethesda Softworks acquired the development studio Flashpoint Productions, and its founder, Brent Erickson, became the Development Director of Media Technology' West Coast division, MediaTech West. The division produced several titles including Golf Magazine: 36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples, Noctropolis and later the Burnout Championship Drag Racing series.

In 1997, the company acquired XL Translab, a graphics firm that got its start in Catholic University's School of Architecture. XL eventually moved into a new center in Bethesda Softworks' Rockville headquarters. XL Translab has previously done work for PBS as well as television commercials for Fortune 500 companies.

In 1997 and 1998, Bethesda released two The Elder Scrolls expansions based on Daggerfall's code—Battlespire and Redguard—neither of which enjoyed the success of Daggerfall and Arena. The downturn in sales was not limited just to The Elder Scrolls franchise, and the company considered filing for bankruptcy as a result.

1999–2007: ZeniMax, Christopher Weaver lawsuit, Fallout

In 1999, Weaver and Robert A. Altman formed a new parent company for Bethesda Softworks known as ZeniMax Media. In an interview with Edge, he described the company as being a top-level administrative structure rather than a "parent company" for its holdings, explaining that "ZeniMax and Bethesda for all intents and purposes are one thing. Bethesda has no accounting department, we have no finance, we have no legal, our legal department [and] our financial department is ZeniMax, we all operate as one unit."

In 2001, Bethesda Game Studios was established, relegating Bethesda Softworks to being a publishing brand of ZeniMax Media.

In 2002, Weaver filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax, claiming he was ousted by his new business partners after giving them access to his brand and was owed $1.2 million in severance pay when ZeniMax didn't renew his employment contract. In the end the case was dropped out of court, because Weaver was going through emails of the other employees to find evidence for his case. Additionally in February 2007, Weaver said that he still owned 33% of ZeniMax's Stock, even though the last game he was credited on was Morrowind. It is unknown whether or not Weaver has any stock in ZeniMax today, mostly due to the fact that Providence Equity bought 25% of ZeniMax's stock in late 2007, and an unknown percentage again in 2010 in exchange for their investments.

In 2004, the Fallout franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks from Interplay Productions and the development of Fallout 3 was handed over to Bethesda Game Studios. Fallout 3 was released on October 28, 2008. Five downloadable content packs for Fallout 3 were released in the year following its release—Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta. Obsidian Entertainment's new Fallout title, Fallout: New Vegas was published in 2010. Fallout 4 was released on November 10, 2015.

2007–present: Capital increase, publishing expansions

Since the influx of capital from Providence Equity Partners in 2007 as well as other investors the following year, Bethesda Softworks and its parent company ZeniMax Media have been rapidly expanding.

In February 2008, the company opened a European publishing arm in London, ZeniMax Europe, to distribute titles throughout UK/EMEA territories under the Bethesda Softworks brand. This was followed in by opening publishing offices in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, Benelux, Hong Kong and Sydney in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013 respectively.

On June 24, 2009, Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax Media, acquired id Software, whose titles, including Rage, would be published by Bethesda Softworks.

Between 2009 and 2012, the company began ramping up its publishing operations, by publishing games from independent third party developers such as Rebellion Developments's Rogue Warrior, Artificial Mind and Movement's Wet, Splash Damage's Brink, and inXile's Hunted: The Demon's Forge.

Since 2012, Bethesda Softworks has mostly been publishing games, from studios either acquired or established by ZeniMax, such as Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Evil Within among many others.

1980s and 1990s

2000s

2010s

Controversies

I think all of the stuff that you've heard at this point has been from one side of this, and it's been somebody putting spin on it, like, 'here's what happened.' No, that's your version of what you think happened. I haven't heard from anybody yet that actually sat in the room. There are quite a few folks at Human Head that I really like. Chris Rhinehart is one of the nicest guys I have ever met in this industry. He's somebody I would consider a friend. I love hanging out with him. This isn't anything to do with anything personal. I love that guy. I like a lot of the folks up there. It just has to do more with what the product looks like and if it's good enough. As we said in our last update, it's not good enough. It's not where it needs to be. When we have more info than that, we'll let you know.

Lawsuits