![]() ![]() Electronic Arts was so impressed with Gridiron! that they hired Bethesda to develop the first John Madden Football. Weaver, though he knew little of the sport, found lookup tables boring, and believed that there must be a better way to make a football game. Fletcher wanted to produce a football game that relied on what most sports games of the 1980s had before it: lookup tables of player statistics. The rewritten rules of Bethesda's first title, Gridiron!, were essentially produced by happenstance. Fletcher's vision for the company was humbler than Weaver's, hoping only to design a game for the Amiga at a low cost. He had created Bethesda "to see if the PC market was a viable place to develop games." The executive command and personal investment allotted to himself allowed the company to become, in Weaver's words, "a boutique house," a house which "kept rewriting rules and inventing new things." Weaver, in the opinion of journalist Joe Blancato, was a man "used to having good ideas." The first employee after Weaver, Edward Fletcher, was trained as an electrical engineer, had worked as a debugger, computer equipment designer and programmer. ![]() "For 18 years," Weaver stated, "from 1981 through 1999, all the money that was invested in the company was my own." Prior to creating Bethesda, Weaver had worked at MIT on "speech parsers, graphic interface and synthesized worlds - what people now call virtual reality.bleeding edge stuff." He had worked in news broadcast directing at NBC and as the Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC, eventually becoming Chief Engineer to the House Subcommittee on Communications. The company's founder, Chris Weaver, had, by Arena's release, transformed the company from a committee-run organization to one run which had to follow "a single person's vision": his. "So, our founder, sitting at his kitchen table in Bethesda decided after laborious thought to add Bethesda to Softworks and there you have it!" Bethesda was acquired by ZeniMax Media, Inc., co-founded by Weaver, in 1999. Weaver, company President Vlatko Andonov recalls, had originally wanted to call the company "Softworks," but found the name taken. Founded in 1985 by Christopher Weaver in Bethesda, Maryland they moved to Rockville, Maryland in 1990, and have a long history of PC and console games. Bethesda Softworks has been a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment content for over two- and a half decades. ![]()
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