For years, Bethesda has been making games for mature audiences that seem diametrically opposed to the audiences for Nintendo products.
But in the past week, Nintendo announced that Bethesda’s Doom and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus are coming to the Switch, Nintendo’s hybrid portable and home console. In addition, Bethesda previously announced that Skyrim would also release on the Switch. The Switch’s success and Nintendo’s own journey suggest that the company is expanding far beyond the kids’ market, and that means mature titles like Bethesda’s games can find new audiences where none existed before.
At a recent preview event, I played Doom on the Switch and talked with Pete Hines, the vice president of marketing and communications at Bethesda, about the willingness to experiment. Beyond Nintendo, we also talked about Bethesda’s moves into virtual reality games.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Pete Hines is vice president of marketing and communications at Bethesda.
Image Credit: Bethesda
GamesBeat: The Switch games are getting close to ready, yeah?
Pete Hines: Right. We haven’t given out dates yet, but we will before long.
GamesBeat: There’s probably quite a bit of pent-up demand for something like this on a Nintendo platform.
Hines: We haven’t done anything on a Nintendo platform in forever. Breath of the Wild being the runaway colossal hit that it is, there’s certainly some belief like, “Hey, if you like open-world RPGs where you can explore and do what you want, Skyrim might be a good fit for you.”
I don’t know what the exact size is, but some number of people who own Switches have never played Skyrim before. It’s a new thing for them, and for folks who have played the game, the ability to take it on the road—you’re going on a trip or commuting to work, it’s a great time.
And Doom is a completely different kind of game from what everyone else is doing. It’s a very visceral, violent, bloody, fun first-person shooter. We’re excited. They both have their place in what’s going on with that platform.
GamesBeat: Between Breath of the Wild and Skyrim, you might need only two games to fill a year with your Switch.
Hines: [Laughs] You get a lot of game for your money, that’s for sure.
GamesBeat: Was it difficult at all to get Doom to run on the Switch?
Hines: Probably no more so than any other platform. Every time you go to a new platform, there’s always going to be challenges in terms of how they do this or do that differently from the PC. But we feel like we have something that represents the game and looks really good. Some games may look as good as Doom on the Switch, but I’m not sure that anything looks better. It’s an impressive-looking game and it’s still really fun to play.
GamesBeat: When you put it on the big screen, you’re probably getting something that doesn’t look much different than elsewhere.
Hines: That’s the goal, yeah.
GamesBeat: With these games on these platforms, what are some of the expectations? Do you think these games can do just as well on Switch as the platforms they’re already launched on?
Hines: Certainly we think they can really well. What that means respective to the installed base or to other stuff—we’re not coming from the same place with Skyrim in terms of, “Everyone on this platform already knows the Elder Scrolls series.” There’s some amount of—this is new to folks. We have to introduce it to them and explain what it is. It’s the same with Doom. There is some crossover, but there’s also a new audience that isn’t sure what these games are. They haven’t played a Doom or a Skyrim. There is some education there as far as, “Here’s why these games are cool and fun.”
GamesBeat: Did you have any particular kind of conversation with Nintendo when you proposed this?
Hines: Honestly, it’s been a long series of them. They came out to see us before they unveiled the Switch to show us what the hardware was like, what they were doing with it. We’ve been in constant conversation with them, and not just about the two games we have now, but about our whole approach to the platform going forward – what we can do, best practices, what things are a good fit, what they’re excited about in what we’re doing.
We’re obviously excited about these two games, but it’s not as if we’re going to just do these two games and that’s it. We want this to be the start of a relationship that we build with Nintendo and Nintendo fans.
GamesBeat: With the installed base growing at the rate it is, is it back to being as good a platform as any?
Hines:
The thing we really like—a lot of us, myself and a good chunk of the folks here working this event, we all brought our Switches with us. We have them on the plane. That’s something you can do with that platform that you can’t do with others. I can play this home, but more important, I can take it with me to places I can’t take Destiny 2. I can take this on the plane, to my hotel room, on vacation. That portability, for those of us who live and breathe video games, is a pretty cool feature.
