Pete Hines, who no longer works at Bethesda, has spoken about the exact moment when Bethesda Game Studios became a serious threat to the rest of the field.

When did Bethesda Game Studios become the kind of studio we think of today? When did it enter that tier of developers whose every major release automatically becomes an event? Was it with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? Was it The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? Or maybe Fallout 3? According to former Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines, none of those is quite the real answer. In an interview with Firezide Chat, Hines said the studio’s first truly defining moment of that kind was 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. That wasn’t the case with Skyrim. If you think you’re going to win Game of the Year, you have to be concerned about us. You have to take us seriously now. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind let us stay in business, but it was not this gigantic success that everybody was talking about.

With The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we became the consensus Game of the Year pick. Oblivion felt like we belong here. We are good enough to do this. It doesn’t matter how big we are. It doesn’t matter how big our competition is. We can do this. And we carried that belief into Skyrim. We made role-playing games accessible to this huge audience of people who had never played an RPG before, but who looked at Skyrim and said that just looks fun”, Hines recalled.

So Skyrim was the moment when Bethesda Game Studios became a genuine danger in the eyes of other studios. Morrowind was crucial to the studio’s legacy, but it was not a worldwide giant. Oblivion came very close to the level later cemented by Skyrim, and in some ways laid the groundwork for that sequel’s huge success.

Oblivion, however, already looked like the game that elevated Bethesda from being a hardcore and brilliant RPG studio into the kind of studio console manufacturers wanted standing on the E3 stage.

Source: PCGamer, Firezide Chat