Summary
Bethesdahas anextremely long and storied history. Considering how many decades it has been around, it might be shocking to know that the average gamer can really only name a handful of its titles.
What’s more, you’d be hard-pressed to find a younger fan who can name a game outside of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, with Starfield being the notable exception. This article will hopefully open up your eyes to some of Bethesda’s more obscure titles. Even if it doesn’t inspire you to go and play them, it will at least give you a bigger appreciation of the company’s history.
This list focuses on games developed by Bethesda Softworks or Bethesda Game Studios, and not games published by Bethesda but developed at other studios.
7Terminator: Future Shock
A Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter
While Bethesda is known for its first-person experiences, the games with guns are not renowned for their tight shooting mechanics. It may surprise you to find out, then, that the company made a first-person shooter in 1995 set in the Terminator universe.
Terminator: Future Shock goes beyond what many FPS games were doing at the time and isn’t just a Doom clone. The environments have a real cohesiveness to them, and there are vehicle segments to spice up the gameplay. It was way ahead of its time for also relying on mouse aiming for precise shooting.
6An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire
A Dungeon Crawler
Battlespire takes place in the Elder Scrolls canon and looks like a traditional Elder Scrolls game on the surface, but it quickly reveals itself as a different beast. For starters, the game is much simpler than a mainline title, being a more focused dungeon crawler than an epic RPG taking place in a gigantic open-world.
Though dungeons are an integral part of the Elder Scrolls experience, boiling a game down to that one feature did not sit well with critics, most of whom were lukewarm about the game upon launch.
Battlespire also features multiplayer for the first time in the series' history.
5Wayne Gretzky Hockey
An Early Hockey Simulator
It’s hard to imagine now, but Bethesda got its start making sports games. Its most notable contribution to the genre was in the field of Hockey. Wayne Gretzky Hockey came out on both PC and in the arcades and was hailed as one of the better takes on the sport.
The game is extremely simple by today’s standards, with camera movement limited to sliding left and right to follow the action, but this simplicity certainly lends it a certain charm. No one at the time had any idea Bethesda would go on to make significantly more complex PC games just a few years later.
4The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard
A Clunky Action-Adventure Game
3D action/adventure games on the PC had a rough go of it in the 1990s. Notable examples of poorly done 3D games of the era include Prince of Persia 3D and Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard.
It’s a third-person, open-world adventure game. The game is bogged down by clunky controls and the scale of its world only magnifies these issues. It wasn’t great back in the day, and it hasn’t aged any better since then. The idea of a more focused adventure game in the Elder Scrolls world is novel, and maybe one day they will execute it better.
3Gridiron!
Bethesda’s First Game Ever
Gridiron! is the first title ever from Bethesda, being made in designer Ed Fletcher’s home even before familiar names like Todd Howard joined the legendary studio. The game stood out among the forever crowded sports genre by combining the strategy prevalent in real-life American Football with the arcade-style gameplay many love about the medium.
The graphics are even more primitive than Wayne Gretzky Hockey’s visuals, with players on the field being represented by colored dots. There isn’t much reason to play this game, but it’s interesting to see the studio’s humble beginnings.
2The Elder Scrolls: Blades
A Mobile Entry Into The Series
While it wouldn’t be fair to call The Elder Scrolls: Blades a failure or obscure, the mobile game market, while huge, has a tendency to pass by many gamers who focus on console experiences or more prestige handhelds like the Nintendo Switch.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades isn’t exactly a normal Elder Scrolls title put on phones. It isn’t open-world and lacks the environmental interactions most come to expect from the series. Combat, which you engage in using touch-screen controls, is the main focus here. After you beat the main campaign,there is a fairly dedicated community of PVP playerswho you can face off against.
Though primarily advertised as a game for mobile phones, Blades also came out for the Nintendo Switch.
1Escape From Singe’s Castle
Basically One Long Quick-Time Event
Though this game is sometimes called Dragon’s Lair 2, it should not be mixed up with another game called Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp. Looking at the history of Dragon’s Lair reveals a complicated web of sequels and ports, and it’s easy to get different games confused with each other.
The gameplay somewhat mirrors the arcade versions of this series, where you have to press an input at the right time to avoid a certain trap within the dungeon.It’s basically a giant quick-time event.Bethesda only handled the MS-Dos port of the game. At the time, the company was still focusing mostly on sports titles, so the medieval aesthetic can be seen as foreshadowing The Elder Scrolls series.
