Bethesda Softworks Bethesda Softworks , LLC , a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media , is a video game developer and publisher . Bethesda Softworks is notable for developing the game series . History . Bethesda Softworks has been a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment content for over two - and a half decades . 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 . Weaver , company President Vlatko Andonov recalls , had originally wanted to call the company " Softworks , " but found the name taken . " 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 . 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 . " 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 . 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 . Fletcher ' s vision for the company was humbler than Weaver ' s , hoping only to design a game for the Amiga at a low cost . The rewritten rules of Bethesda ' s first title , Gridiron ! were essentially produced by happenstance . 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 . 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 . Electronic Arts was so impressed with Gridiron ! that they hired Bethesda to develop the first John Madden Football . Bethesda eventually decided to sue EA in 1987 for USD $ 7 . 3 million , claiming that the company halted cross - console release of Gridiron ! after incorporating many of its elements into their own John Madden Football . Bethesda ' s early games scored respectably in the gaming press , earning such accolades as " the most accurate and enjoyable simulation of a sport I have ever had the pleasure to play , " " the best ice hockey sim yet , " for Wayne Gretzky Hockey , and a note that Gridiron ! " demands a look . " With a broad panoply of games in role - playing , racing , simulation , and sports , Bethesda Softworks major franchises are distributed worldwide . Bethesda is credited with the creation of the first physics - based sports simulation ( Gridiron ) in 1986 for the Atari ST , Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 / 128 , which led to Bethesda ' s creation of the first John Madden Football game for Electronic Arts . Despite their long history of development in many genres , they are perhaps best known for creating The Elder Scrolls RPG series which Weaver initiated in 1992 , based upon the original programming of Julian Lefay . The first chapter of the series , entitled The Elder Scrolls : Arena , was released in 1994 . Since that time , numerous other chapters have been released . The previous chapter , , was released in November 2011 , and is the latest in the series having been released on April 4 , 2014 . Bethesda is also the publisher for three Star Trek games , Star Trek - Legacy ( For PC / Xbox 360 ) , Star Trek - Tactical Assault ( for Nintendo DS / PlayStation Portable ) , and Star Trek - Encounters ( PS2 ) . Press Release In 2004 , Bethesda acquired the Fallout franchise from Interplay Entertainment . Todd Howard said in January 2007 that " We started work [ on Fallout 3 ] in late 2004 with a few people . We only had about 10 people on it until Oblivion wrapped , but most of our staff is on it now . " Bethesda Software is also becoming well known for their work on Xbox 360s , with them being the " first company to ever release an expansion pack on the Xbox 360 , back with Oblivion , and also the " guinea pigs " for introducing Downloadable Content to the Xbox , presumably with the " Fallout " series . Elder Scrolls series . The following is a complete list of publications made by Bethesda in series .