24 years at Bethesda with Pete Hines – “There's no question that the company is not the same”

For 24 years Pete Hines was up there with Vault Boy and Todd Howard as one of the public faces of Bethesda. As senior vice president of global marketing and communications, few others at the company had such a broad overview of its strategy and focus, its highs and lows. 

Two years after his retirement, where he spends his free time as a pro bono advisor for people struggling in the games industry, I got the chance to reminisce with him about one of the most fascinating careers in video games. 

It all started with a love for a strategy game called X-COM: UFO Defense.

Hines worked at the American College of Cardiology in the comms department at the time. These were the days when the internet wasn’t readily accessible in most people’s homes, so he’d head down to the campus library and use the computers there. 

“I started [going to the library] because of the original X-COM, a game that I absolutely loved,” Hines tells me from his office after shuffling his dogs outside. “I was desperate to figure out if they were making a sequel so that was the first thing I looked for when I got on the internet.” 

That’s when he stumbled on a website called The Adrenaline Vault, a new games website which had an advertisement calling out for volunteer writers. He applied straight away, got a role on the team shortly after, and wrote articles for several years alongside his full-time job and attending MBA school. 

“I vividly remember when I talked to Bethesda about this job, (senior vice president of product development) Todd Vaughn, who became a very good friend of mine, said, ‘How'd you like to combine your jobs and run marketing and comms for Bethesda?’ I jumped at the chance.” 

It was October 1999, just after the company had been acquired by ZeniMax. Bethesda the publisher was still a fairly small shop. Around ten people worked in the same unit as Hines, all stuffed into a single hallway in the main building. 

Like Hines, my family didn’t have the internet in the early 2000s either. Every trip to a video games shop was like perusing through a used book store, checking the cases, constantly looking for new experiences for my Xbox. One day, I saw the case for a game called Morrowind on the shelves. It looked like a dusty tome on the front and the small screenshots on the back didn’t give much away, but the text promised a fantasy world where you could go anywhere and be anyone. I picked it up on that promise, trading in a bunch of old games to buy it.

The entire bus journey home, I read the manual front to back. It had pages and pages of detailed information about the different schools of magic, spellmaking, enchanting, alchemy, the races you can choose from, birthsigns, and more. I’d never seen anything like it, and began building an image of my character in my mind before I ever stuck the disc in the tray. 

Pete Hines wrote that manual. 

“That's the company I belong to,” Hines says, reminiscing about the good old days when Bethesda was light and agile. “When we shipped Morrowind, I didn't have staff. It was me and a marketing artist, and we did everything that had to be done. I was managing the forums as a moderator. Todd Vaughn comes into my office one day and goes, ‘I don't have a manual. Somebody else tried to do it, and it's not very good. Don’t worry, you’ll do great’. God, I didn't know shit about writing manuals, but he trusted me.

“That was part of what made Bethesda special. Have you ever heard anybody use the phrase, ‘it's not personal, it's just business?’ I think that's what assholes say, because you are interacting with another human being. My philosophy with Bethesda was always: this is going to be both. Yes, we're running a business, but I am not holding back any of who I am and how I think we ought to do things.” 

In those early days – before ZeniMax grew to 2,500 employees at its peak – the developers would assemble the physical product, placing the discs in their cases and shrinkwrapping them for delivery. Hines didn’t grow into being a spokesperson at Bethesda because he wanted to be famous — there just wasn’t anyone else to do it with the same top-down, bottom-up view of the company he had. He felt responsible for ensuring the messaging landed, even when he found himself turning up on stage at a Fallout 76 press event with a severe concussion. 

“I was playing over 40s soccer, and took a forearm into the side of the head,” Hines remembers with a wince. “My wife had to come pick me up. I was throwing up, it was bad. I was like, ‘This is the biggest event we've ever done, there's no universe in which I'm not going to this.’ When you have a concussion, they tell you to avoid bright flashing lights and a lot of sound. So what I did was go to a press event where a bunch of people are playing a video game all day long. I remember so little about that trip.” 

It was a sense of loyalty and dedication that came from the very top of the company. CEO and founder, the late Robert Altman, was respected and adored at Bethesda. During the pandemic, he’d send out poetic, company-wide, morale-boosting emails every week, and even in more precedented times he’d take the time to speak to people at every level of the company. He was a lawyer and businessman, but he knew video game companies are nothing without their talent, which is something he always wanted to nurture. 

“It was Robert Altman's company, and we were his employees, no question,” Hines says. “But he treated us more like family, and we found a culture that really fit us. When it was working, it was magical. We were a small, private company. It's way easier to stay out of scrutiny when you're not having to put your earnings reports out for the whole world. There's just no question that the company is not the same. It has been radically changed and altered from the company that we built. It is what it is. Things change. Things move on, but at its height, it was really a special thing to be a part of.” 

In those “magical” days, when their Christmas parties were hosted at Dave and Buster’s and Altman would hand out bonuses in little envelopes, the company’s hardline was honesty and integrity. Do what you say you’ll do, and be transparent about what you’re going to do. Sometimes they missed the mark, but the intent was always there. It’s hard to keep the goal in your crosshairs when the target is always moving. 

“The great Todd Howard says that great games are played, not made,” Hines explains of the company’s philosophy. “Meaning, every idea you have about what's good or not only matters if somebody starts playing it and then that's what's going to define whether it's good or not. Oblivion changed combat systems three times during development. So we were careful not to talk about how combat works, because we don't even know if the version we've got is final. So we're trying to place our bets on what parts of the game we feel confident are going to resonate with people.” 

A classic example of this happened during the development of Arkane Austin’s Dishonored, a systems-heavy game where your abilities and the rules of the world can interact in unexpected ways. A QA tester was recording some data about fall damage to test the limits of players being able to jump from height and survive, when one day they used a power during their fall and accidentally possessed a fish — like, they were inside the fish, they didn’t suddenly own a fish. The developers didn’t know at this point that you could even possess fish – it was originally intended for rats and humans – but the immersive sim design philosophy creates these bizarre interactions. Instead of fixing it as a bug, the level designers got to work on creating some hidden fish routes through levels, allowing cunning players to swim up drainpipes as a slimy slapper to infiltrate buildings. 

“All of a sudden, the game’s water goes from not mattering at all to, ‘Oh, it really matters’, because we're not going to take that out,” Hines says. “But now we have to account for it. So the pivot is we should talk about embracing player creativity. That is the trouble — you're trying to tell the story of the thing that's eventually going to be while it's still being made, and trying not to get wrong which parts are going to change.” 

Before Dishonored, Bethesda was going through a change of its own. It was publishing third-party titles including Rogue Warrior, Wet, Sea Dogs and all manner of other forgettable games I rented from Blockbusters. Part of Bethesda’s identity got swept up with the quality of the games it was publishing. It didn’t help that back then, Skyrim studio Bethesda Game Studios (BGS) wasn’t even called BGS — it was just Bethesda. 

“I hated the confusion around Bethesda making a new game, and everybody thinking, ‘Oh, it's Todd Howard's team,” Hines says. “And he was very much sick of it. ‘Why do people keep assuming I'm the guy who made Sea Dogs, or whatever?’ And so we created a different name for the studio and the publisher, and guess what? It still didn't f***ing work. Nobody ever got past Bethesda, and they just went Bethesda this, Bethesda that, Bethesda, Bethesda, Bethesda.” 

Things turned around in 2009-2010 when Bethesda went on a buying spree to build out its internal studios, grabbing Doom developer id Software first, followed by Arkane Studios, The Evil Within’s Tango Gameworks, and Wolfenstein’s MachineGames. For the most part it felt like there was a real shared DNA between these studios, an admiration for the same kinds of things. Immersive first-person experiences, some systemic design crossover, single-player focused. Bethesda developed its own identity as a publisher by putting out games that other companies just weren’t making. It helped that Bethesda kept the teams intact post-acquisition. 

“It was a big deal,” Hines says. “We really respected what id Software did. And honestly, that conversation wasn't, ‘Hey, we want to acquire you.’ Much like MachineGames, and much like Arkane, it just started with: ‘We would love to make something with you, we have a lot of respect for what you do, and we see the common DNA.’ And if you have a chance to work with [Resident Evil creator and Tango Gameworks founder] Shinji Mikami, you should always say yes.”

You can see this synergy in how all of the studios embraced QuakeCon, a Bethesda run annual event named after an arena shooter that grew into a bigger event encompassing every Bethesda studio and game. And because the studios shared certain design principles, the audience who were there for Quake and shaking because they’re coming down hard after boffing a crate of Bawls energy drinks were often just as excited to see what else Bethesda was cooking. 

“We started growing into some competencies and building internal expertise where we weren't working with outside people who have their own conflicts,” Hines says. “It became useful because if you’re working on guns at Bethesda Game Studios, maybe you should have a conversation with id Software about how they make their guns feel so weighty and powerful. We want to let them make what they want to make. All of these people who have careers and families and are paying for tuition and rent — we take seriously the responsibility of looking after these people.”

One example of Bethesda putting its team health first came off the back of a complaint from Todd Howard, who was feeling burned out by the way the company handled E3, the former games conference in LA. They’d do back to back to back appointments every day for the entire week, showing the same section of gameplay that’d then be filtered out by the press in bitesized chunks. For Fallout 4, there was one demo live on stage for the press and the public to sift through, giving the team a much less stressful schedule for the week after already working for months on the demo. The company structure allowed Bethesda to experiment like this, going against the consensus fuelled by a belief in its games and the people behind them.

”If I had a nickel for every time somebody said Morrowind would never work on an Xbox…” Hines remembers. “Oh, Skyrim can't survive going up against Call of Duty. 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.’ They told us not to release Oblivion in May. Nobody releases games in the spring, that'll never work. We did just fine.

“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.” 

When he looks back at his career, Hines doesn’t have many regrets once you peer in and pull the curtain back, but a certain canvas bag still haunts him. The Fallout 76 Power Armour Edition was supposed to come with a canvas West Tek bag, but buyers opened their parcels to find a cheap nylon alternative. Bethesda changed the advertising copy on its website, claimed the swap happened due to a rise in canvas prices, and offered a small amount of in-game currency as an apology. It was eventually fixed and players were sent what was promised seven months later. Hines only found out about the snafu the day his own Collector’s Edition turned up. 

“My first reaction was, ‘When the f**k did we add a canvas bag to this collector's edition?’ Because the version I approved did not have one,” Hines says. “They were trying to add more value to the Collectors Edition. We were always fighting with the finance people about margins, right? I would throw shit fits around. ‘We cannot charge $300 for this, it's f***ing insulting.’ But in this case, their hearts were in the right place. There was literally a canvas shortage, and some folks decided we're going to do this instead. My biggest failing there was not pushing immediately for making and sending one to everybody that wants one. Because I was still annoyed that the damn thing was in there in the first place, and nobody had told me and that this canvas shortage happened. It's probably the dumbest thing I ever did at Bethesda.”

It’s an answer that surprises me after Hines’s 24-year run with the company. I’ve made worse mistakes in a three-month probationary period. It does make me wonder how he felt about Prey, though. 

Prey was the next game after Dishonored from the team at Arkane Austin, pitched as a spiritual sequel to System Shock. It sees the player fighting against aliens on a huge, interconnected space station, using powers and smarts to overcome terrible odds. It had some brilliant ideas, from the design of the station itself to the creative powers you can use – the much-marketed shapeshifting into a coffee cup among them – and was a completely original concept beyond sharing some design principles and the sci-fi setting of System Shock. Arkane had some ideas for a game title, but Bethesda wanted them to use one it already had: Prey. 

Prey was a name with lots of baggage. First off, there was already a game called Prey, a first-person shooter with puzzles where you play as a Native American who’s been abducted by aliens. It has a dedicated fanbase. Then there was Prey 2, a cancelled game from Human Head Studios where you played as a human bounty hunter who lives among alien civilisations. It generated a lot of buzz with its announcement trailer, which mixed parkour and freeform action to deliver a fantasy players had been asking for, but it never got up to the quality levels Bethesda wanted from it and was cancelled. Arkane’s Prey had nothing to do with either game beyond the name, which confused new players and angered anyone who loved the original Prey or was excited about the cancelled sequel. 

“Don't even get me started on that,” Hines replies when I ask. “I definitely pissed some people off internally over that because I fought so hard against using that name. I'm the head of the spear, but I had a lot of people across my team – brand, PR and community – and we feel like we're burdening it with a name where we spend more time explaining why it's called Prey than we do talking about the game. I regret that I lost that battle. But nobody on this planet could have put more of a good faith effort into changing minds on that. My whole point was, look how much time we spend talking about what the game is versus why it's called this and like, that is wasted energy. That is wasted excitement. We could be turning that into something positive.” 

That’s part of the reason Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush was announced and launched on the same day. Bethesda didn’t want to waste its energy explaining why the survival horror game studio was making a rhythm action game. Here’s the game, play it and judge it for yourself. If we believe what Xbox says, it was another success, reaching three million players. But what does success even mean in the age of subscriptions? After all, three million players is a totally different metric to three million sales. A year after that success, Microsoft closed the studio down (fortunately, Tango was later revived by Krafton), alongside Dishonored developer Arkane Austin, which also had an Xbox Game Pass launch with its vampire co-op shooter, Redfall. 

“I'm not working in any of these companies anymore, and so I don't assume that everything I knew while I was in the industry still holds true today,” Hines says. “At the same time, I'm involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said. Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can't buy a product anymore. When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack shit – then you have a real problem. You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product. That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making.”

If music is anything to go by, it’s a tension that’ll change games themselves, too, given enough time. Shorter songs with immediate hooks are incentivised because they play better with the algorithm that serves listeners new music on Spotify, so musicians are doing the artistic equivalent of SEO to try to get their music to a wider audience. As our attention spans sap thanks to snackable media and TikTok reels, there’s a real chance game developers will have to compete for our limited attention spans and shrinking wallets in a similar way, bending the art just to get noticed in an industry bursting with options. Everyone's been conditioned. The attention economy is the worst it's ever been, the kids are scrolling vertical videos, they want live events and crossovers, and they think every game should be a forever game, updated until the developers turn into a Fallout skeleton. 

“Nobody wants to do the same thing over and over and over again,” Hines says. “Nobody likes the forced march of serializing something. Bethesda didn't just only do Elder Scrolls, right? For a while, that's all we owned. We decided to go after Fallout because Todd Howard said we need to stretch our legs creatively and go in different directions, and it'll make our Elder Scrolls games better.” 

In the early 2000s, there was pressure for BGS to keep making Elder Scrolls games, but Hines, Howard, and everyone else at the studio pushed to let them flex their creative muscles. With every Elder Scrolls, they threw everything out and started from almost nothing, reworking every facet of the game to deliver a new experience. Without dipping their toes into other genres and experiences, the series everyone cared about the most wouldn’t be the same – it would have stagnated like Call of Duty. 

It was important for the developers, too, who wanted to work on more than one project for the rest of their lives and could potentially jump to another studio if left creatively unsatisfied. Even if you’re a suit who only cares about money, why throw away all the skills and expertise you’ve nurtured over the years? Allowing the people who make art to hone their craft and experiment is an investment in the future and the only guaranteed way to make better games.  

“The people making the games are people,” Hines says. “Yes, they are employees. But if you don't see them as people first and employees second, then I don't think you're going to understand how they're motivated. You're talking about highly creative artists, programmers, and designers, and they don't want to be hemmed into this tiny little box, painting the same picture again and again.”