A Brief History of Bethesda Softworks

The people over at Spawnio have penned a short editorial that briefly covers the history of Bethesda Softworks, from their early days of starting the Madden franchise to their move to the post-apocalyptic wasteland:

One of Bethesda’s early major accomplishments is being credited with creating the first physics-based sports simulation with Gridiron! in 1986 for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64/128. Although they aren’t responsible for developing the game, John Madden Football was created largely using the design and physics based concept of Gridiron! While the company actually created many games over many different genres, Bethesda is most known for their juggernaut RPG series The Elder Scrolls. In 2004 they received the rights to the Fallout series and in 2008 released Fallout 3 which won over 60 Game of the Year awards. While Bethesda won’t be developing the follow-up to Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas will be published by the company. The guys over at Bethesda Softworks have continued to expand their publishing duties with the releases of WET and Rouge Warrior in 2009 and the upcoming title Brink for developer Splash Damage. In June of 2009, ZeniMax Media acquired id Software whose games will be published by Bethesda Softworks.