One of the biggest corporate acquisitions in gaming history is official: Microsoft owns Bethesda.
Technically, Microsoft now owns much more than Bethesda and its Elder Scrolls and Fallout games: It bought Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media, which also owns id Software, Arkane, MachineGames, and Tango Gameworks. Corporate structure somewhat obscures the reality here, though. ZeniMax and Bethesda aren't interchangeable, but they are much more closely linked than ZeniMax and any of the other studios. The purchase of Bethesda, not those studios, is really what marks the end of an era.
That's because Bethesda isn't just one of the developers under the ZeniMax umbrella. The umbrella was made for Bethesda when ZeniMax was formed in 1999 by the late Robert A Altman and Bethesda's original founder, Christopher Weaver. It was later, starting around 2010, that ZeniMax started buying other studios, whose games Bethesda now publishes—it's the Bethesda Softworks label, not ZeniMax Media, that appears on the recent Doom games, the Dishonored games, The Evil Within, and all the others.
Weaver stopped working at ZeniMax in 2002 and has since sold most of his shares, but it still makes sense to look at Bethesda's run from its founding in 1986 to this year's Microsoft acquisition as one unbroken era. And as a publisher and developer, the company had quite a run in that time: The Bethesda label was stamped on everything from in-house classics like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind to half-forgotten dreams like Wet and Brink. All in all, Bethesda published around 100 games from the time it was founded to the Microsoft acquisition this year.
Now that a new era is beginning for the 35-year-old company, we felt it was a good time to look back at the games that define Bethesda. There's a full list of Bethesda games on Wikipedia, but below are the most notable from our perspective:
What's next for Bethesda under Microsoft?
Although there's some talk of Xbox exclusivity—which these days really means Xbox and Windows exclusivity—we don't expect to see any immediate changes to Bethesda or the ZeniMax studios as a result of Microsoft's acquisition. The new circumstances will surely alter the companies in the long run, but for now, they continue to work on the same games we were expecting.
The next big thing from Bethesda Game Studios itself is Starfield, a sci-fi RPG that we know very little about. We do know that it will release before The Elder Scrolls 6, but we know even less about that game, which may not even release until the middle of the decade, or later.
Meanwhile, Arkane Lyon is working on a time-warping assassination game called Deathloop, MachineGames has an Indiana Jones game in the works, and id Software is presumably planning to keep the Doom success going. Over in Japan, The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks is working on spooky action game GhostWire: Tokyo.
As of 2019, the ZeniMax group also includes Roundhouse Studios, which is made up of the former staff of the defunct Human Head Studios, makers of Rune, the original Prey (as well as the version of Prey 2 that Bethesda canceled before rebooting the series with Arkane), Brink, and Defiance, among others. The closure of Human Head and formation of Roundhouse immediately after the release of Rune 2 is actually a point of legal contention for the publisher of that game, which is suing Bethesda over it. (Bethesda is not a stranger to lawsuits; you could tell its history with them.) We're not sure what Roundhouse is up to, but given its history, we expect its development to somehow be storied.
Years from now, the transition into Bethesda's Microsoft era might feel no different than the funding maneuver that led to the formation of ZeniMax in 1999, which replaced the old holding company. Bethesda and the other studios are staffed by the same people they were last week, after all. Todd Howard is still wandering those halls, doing whatever it is Todd Howard spends his days doing. And if Microsoft does exert a strong influence from the start, we can't be sure whether it'll be for the better or worse. For now, all we've noticed is that Skyrim and Fallout 4 might come to Xbox Game Pass for PC, and, hey, that seems pretty alright. We'll have a better picture of what the new Bethesda really looks like in a few years time.
