Pete Hines, who no longer works at Bethesda, talked about the moment Bethesda Game Studios grew into a serious rival.

When did Bethesda Game Studios become the kind of studio we recognize today? When did it join the ranks of developers whose every new release turns into a major public event? Was it The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? Fallout 3? None of the above, if you ask former Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines. In an interview with Firezide Chat, Hines said the studio’s first real moment of that kind came with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

“Everybody played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – that was the thing that made us feel like we had arrived, that we were legitimate. Fallout 3 did a lot for us, but there are people who love that game and there are people who never played it, and that wasn’t true with Skyrim. If you think you’re going to win Game of the Year, you have to worry about us. You have to take us seriously now. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind let us stay in business… it wasn’t some huge breakout success that everybody talked about.

With The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we became the consensus Game of the Year choice. So Oblivion felt like we belonged in this space. We’re good enough to do this. It doesn’t matter how big we are or how big our competitor is. We can do this. And we carried that belief into Skyrim. We managed to make RPGs accessible to a huge group of people who had never played one before, but who gave Skyrim a shot because it simply looked fun”, Hines recalled.

Skyrim was the point where BGS games became a feared rival for other studios. Morrowind was a key part of the studio’s legacy, but it was not a world-famous giant. Oblivion, meanwhile, came very close to the bar that Skyrim would later set and, in some ways, laid the groundwork for that massive success.

Oblivion seemed to be the game that transformed Bethesda from a tough and brilliant RPG studio into one that console manufacturers wanted up on the E3 stage.

Source: PCGamer, Firezide Chat