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You don't need me to remind you about how big a deal Skyrim was (and still is) - it's one of the best-selling, most-modded, memeable, and influential games ever made - but for Bethesda Game Studios, the studio that developed the giant hit, the game was its first "Holy S*** moment."
That's according to Pete Hines, the company's former publishing lead who had been at Bethesda for a whopping 24 years. He told Firezide Chat that Morrowind allowed the company to stay afloat during a rocky financial time and Oblivion solidified the developer as an unignorable presence in the RPG space, but "the Holy S*** moment was actually Skyrim."
Even with Fallout 3, the industry veteran explained that there's "people who love that game and people who never played it, but that wasn't a thing with Skyrim" because "everybody played Skyrim - that was the thing that made us feel like we've arrived, we are legit."
Hines even claimed Skyrim is what made other developers think twice about winning GOTY awards. "You have to be concerned about us if you think you're going to win game of the year. You have to take us seriously now. We have broken out role playing games into a whole huge group of people who have never played an RPG before, but played Skyrim because it just looked like fun," he added.
He took some time to remember what Morrowind and Oblivion did for the company, too. Bethesda's funkiest game Morrowind "bought us a grace period" at a time when the developer "really needed a hit" to keep the lights on. He then credits director Todd Howard for championing Oblivion as an early Xbox 360 game to turn the adventure into a "poster child for what next-gen graphics look [like]." As one of the hit console's first big RPGs, "we were the consensus game of the year off of Oblivion."
But he's still right - Skyrim is arguably the game that made Bethesda a household name even to people who weren't in the weeds in video game news. My university housemates knew the Skyrim memes. Family members who don't know what a Starfield is have played Skyrim. It broke containment, if you will, and travelled well outside of the crowds who already knew and loved the genre.
