About Bethesda
About ZeniMax Media
Headquartered just north of Washington, D.C., with offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, ZeniMax Media is a video game publisher, managed by an experienced group of executives, which has assembled a strong creative team of world-class game developers, graphic artists and designers, sound engineers, producers and programmers to create and sell premium video game titles to a growing worldwide market.
ZeniMax creates and publishes original interactive entertainment content for consoles, the PC, and handheld/wireless devices. Its Bethesda Softworks division, founded in 1986 in the early days of the industry, has a long history of success as a publisher of award-winning video games. In addition, the ZeniMax group includes some of the most acclaimed development studios in the world. The Company's growing library of intellectual properties includes such major franchises as The Elder Scrolls®, Fallout®, Dishonored®, DOOM®, QUAKE®, Wolfenstein®, Prey®, The Evil Within®, and RAGE®.
In addition to developing some of the world’s most popular games, ZeniMax and its studios have a long history of offering innovations that fundamentally changed the video game industry. Among those achievements, Bethesda Game Studios was the first company to create a physics-based sports game, Gridiron, the standard today for the genre. Bethesda also pioneered open world role-playing games, and was the first studio to offer downloadable content for players following a game’s release—now a main source of revenue for publishers. At ZeniMax’s studio in Dallas, id Software invented the most popular form of video game, the first-person shooter, with the release of a game called Wolfenstein; id was also the first studio to offer Deathmatch in multiplayer gaming. Another key milestone was id’s role in the rise of the global e-Sports phenomenon, with a game called Quake, and organized player competition at an annual gathering called QuakeCon, which is more than 20 years old.
ZeniMax’s record of innovation continued with the development of breakthrough technology in virtual reality, or VR, which startled the gaming world when revealed for the first time at the industry gathering, E3, in Bethesda’s booth, to great acclaim. That E3 demonstration showcased another ZeniMax title, DOOM 3 BFG, using proprietary software and hardware that showed the world that commercial VR was possible, and it became a catalyst for the explosion of interest in this platform. More recently, ZeniMax again led the industry by offering mods for its games to both PC and console players, and that technological advance resulted in hundreds of millions of mod downloads by fans of our games in less than a year. Of course, our focus on research and development that moves the industry forward continues, and we plan to make more exciting announcements about ZeniMax innovations in the years ahead.