By 2011, Bethesda had established itself as an RPG studio with reach well beyond the genre's historic niche, and the then-upcoming launch of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was hotly anticipated. There was just one problem: it was launching the same week as Modern Warfare 3, and nobody believed the fantasy RPG would live past the competition.
"Oh, Skyrim can't survive going up against Call of Duty," former Bethesda marketing boss Pete Hines, speaking in an interview with DBLTAP, recalls being told. "Same window. Everybody's gonna play Call of Duty. Nobody's gonna buy your game. I just said, 'I get that they're a big brand, but they're not a better game. I will go up against those guys. I will spend [marketing money] against those guys. I will never spend anywhere near as much and I can still win.'"
Modern Warfare 3 launched on November 8, 2011, just a few days before Skyrim's release on November 11. The FPS was, of course, wildly successful, but people are still playing Skyrim in impressive numbers to this day. Of course, Call of Duty fans have had innumerable sequels to move onto while Skyrim players have to hang onto their old game as the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 still drags on, but the RPG's legacy speaks for itself.
That wasn't the only time Bethesda bucked conventional game industry wisdom. "If I had a nickel for every time somebody said Morrowind would never work on an Xbox," Hines muses, referring to the massive PC RPG's seemingly impossible port to Microsoft's first console. Hines also recalls that "They told us not to release Oblivion in May. Nobody releases games in the spring, that'll never work. We did just fine."
For Hines, "That's what made it so fun, and I think we were better at it than anybody else in terms of what we were able to do, when you look at the awards we won, the players we brought in, and how we went about doing it right. I wanted to be a part of a company where if anybody peeks into a window to see how we're doing this, I feel okay about it."
Hines had a decades-long career at Bethesda, and the interview covers much of it – including his frustration over how everyone assumed that any new game from the publisher came from "Todd Howard's team."
Skyrim remains one of the best RPGs ever made.
