Bethesda Employees Enjoy Working in the Dark

Posted on August 15, 2005

The Washington Post has an article that gives you an idea of what things are like at some of the smaller gaming companies out there. The company profiled is Bethesda Softworks LLC, which has about 100 employees, and its parent company ZeniMax. Bethesda's employees prefer to work in the dark on their current game project called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

"The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" is the company's most ambitious title, three years in the making. Appropriately enough, perhaps, the gamemakers' offices are in a basement in Rockville that is as dark as a dungeon: Drop a pen on the floor, and it might as well be gone forever.
"Every time we try to turn the lights up, they say, 'Turn 'em down!' " said Robert A. Altman, chief executive and chairman of ZeniMax.
"That's the way those guys prefer to work down there," said Altman, a prominent Washington lawyer well known both because of his stature in Democratic circles and his role in the BCCI bank scandal of the early 1990s, in which he was acquitted of all charges.

Like many other games being developed for the Xbox 360, the Oblivion developers are paying great attention to detail:

With the new Xbox scheduled for a November release, Howard has more to worry about than postage. Neither ZeniMax nor Bethesda would put a figure on how much the game is costing to make, but Howard is at the helm of a project with a budget clearly worth several millions of dollars. With the current generation of game consoles, budgets for cutting-edge titles surged past the $10 million mark and are now frequently in the neighborhood of $20 million.
For the investment, Oblivion will feature 50 hours of game dialogue and 1,000 characters -- one featuring the voice of actor Patrick Stewart, the man celebrated in geekdom as Captain Picard of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The game's action takes place in 16 square miles of playing field in a virtual forest (complete with 200 dungeons strewn about).
To make sure soil erosion and geology in the game world looked realistic, the company sent an employee to the University of Maryland to study up on the topics. With new game systems continually offering deeper degrees of realism, it's the sort of attention to detail that players are coming to expect.

Bethesda is also developing the Pirates of the Caribbean game so the future looks bright for Bethesda if either of these two games are hits on the Xbox 360.

XBOX