From Elder Scrolls to Starfield: How Bethesda Defined the Role-Playing Game

08.09.2023 - 14:11 / ign.com / Todd Howard / Tom Clancy / Elder Scrolls

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

When project leader Todd Howard called an off-site meeting, mere months ahead of launch, most of his crew thought they were being laid off. In fact, it was to be the most important moment in the studio’s history. Howard had sent out emails to everyone on his team days earlier, asking them, “If you could have any title in life, what would it be?” In a dim-lit hotel conference room in Rockville, Maryland, he handed out a personalized business card to each Morrowind dev, complete with their chosen honorific, and gave a brief speech. It was a rallying call that saved the game and, according to those who were there, probably the entire company.

“It was a bad time,” Howard told me in 2019. “Morrowind was a very difficult crunch. There was this sense that if we don’t get the game done, and done well, we would be in trouble.” It had been six long years since the developer’s last big hit, 1996’s Daggerfall. “For me, it was kind of a no-fear moment: ‘Well, it can’t get any worse, right? We’re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.’”

And so they reached for the stars. Morrowind became the first Elder Scrolls game to land on consoles, roughly six months into the life cycle of the original Xbox. It sold millions on Xbox alone, rivaled only by the likes of Halo, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and Fable. Howard refers to that period as “the recreation of Bethesda.” Its story spans nearly four decades, from humble beginnings in sports games and movie tie-ins to blockbusters like Skyrim and Fallout 4. But so much of that journey would never have come to pass without Morrowind — and that fateful meeting they remember so vividly.

“Morrowind was kind of this galvanizing, make-or-break moment,” says Skyrim environment-art lead Noah Berry. “It was the crucible by which the modern Elder Scrolls, and the studio as a whole, evolved and was shaped.” Look at Bethesda’s single-player titles from Oblivion on, and you’ll find more or less the same formula Howard concocted for The Elder Scrolls III, a game that changed RPGs forever.

Years earlier, in 1994, The Elder Scrolls: Arena became a cult success thanks to its playful spell-creation system and effectively infinite fantasy world. But some folks at Bethesda weren’t satisfied with