Bethesda Softworks

Christopher Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks in 1986, starting out with sports games. The breakthrough was The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994), and the series grew into Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim — the last of which has been released on more or less anything with a screen. In 2007 it bought the Fallout rights from Interplay.

Parent company ZeniMax Media was formed in 1999 and acquired id Software in 2009, putting Bethesda in charge of publishing Doom and Quake. Microsoft bought ZeniMax in 2021 for $7.5 billion. The games are known for vast open worlds, the in-house Creation Engine, and modders who tend to fix the bugs before the publisher does.