oldBethesda Softworks was founded in 1986 in Maryland, and its early years look nothing like a player today would expect. It began in sport — American football and a run of hockey games carrying Wayne Gretzky's name — and stood out technically by trying to simulate the physics of player movement instead of using canned animation.
The second early line was the Terminator licence. The Terminator from 1990 is remarkable for what it dared: you move around the whole of Los Angeles as an open world, you can get into a car and drive wherever you like, and this at a time when nobody else was going anywhere near the idea. A few years later came Terminator: Future Shock, one of the first shooters with genuinely three dimensional environments and mouse look — something entirely taken for granted now and not at all obvious then.
Both Terminator games were made at a time when licensed titles were assumed to be quick money without ambition. Bethesda instead used them to try things nobody else was attempting — and a good deal of that came in useful later.
The decisive turn came in 1994 with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a large first person role playing game with an entire continent you could walk across. Its sequel Daggerfall then arrived with a world so vast it had to be generated by machine, and it is still cited years later as one of the largest maps any game has ever had.
Redguard, an action branch of the series, belongs to the same era. The catalogue also lists some id Software titles under Bethesda, because their later publishing moved to the same group — which is why you will find things like Doom 2 here.
What we have from them
The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Terminator, Future Shock, Redguard, Wayne Gretzky Hockey and Delta V all run in the browser. Daggerfall and the other titles are here to download.
