Shack: Do you see the in-house Bethesda Game Studios operations expanding at all?

Pete Hines: I don't know. I have to say, when I started we had maybe ten people. We had ten guys working on Morrowind total. [laughs]

Shack: That's almost unbelievable.

Pete Hines: Yeah, I could tell you all their names and where they sat. Now we have eighty-some people working on Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I don't know if we'd ever want to grow bigger to include a new team. I think if we did it we would probably build up a separate team as an autonomous thing, because--God--if we tried to get enough people to take on three projects and stay organized the way we are, it would probably start to get messy. But we're always looking to expand, for new outside developers to work with, for other IP we might want to work with. We haven't stopped growing and trying to expand the number of games we do, but we do it in a very controlled way. We don't want to do twenty games a year, we want to do big games that people stand up and notice. We're trying to do more of those in a smart way.

Shack: Yeah, that's a big step up though, from ten on Morrowind.

Pete Hines: When I got there we had our own warehouse downstairs. When we'd ship a game, we'd finish it and send the disc off for replication and order the boxes, then all that stuff would come downstairs to the basement. Then the devs used to actually go downstairs and work the assembly line, putting boxes into pallets and shrinkwrapping, and preparing for shipping. It was total mom and pop business, doing all the books and boxes. We went from that, to this. That's the sort of thing we think about, when we win stuff like the Spike TV awards, just a bunch of guys you've never heard of from Rockville, Maryland.

Shack: And hey, when you win our awards you know you're big time. [laughs]

Pete Hines: And Shacknews, man! We had a party that day! [laughs] But to come that far, with everything we've been through, staying small and doing everything we want to, it's pretty amazing. When you look at who we've outlived in the twenty years we've been in this business, it's staggering the number of companies that have come and gone, come and gone.

Shack: Sometimes it can seem like a bleak situation for independent developers. What do you think about today's market with respect to independent studios?

Pete Hines: Of course, we're slightly different because we're a publisher too. For a developer where you're just isolated to that part and just working on the one game, it's a hand-to-mouth thing.

Shack: Do you think that's a flawed model in this industry?

Pete Hines: Hmm... I don't know. You could pull five developers, and they'd all have different stories. You know, Valve seems to be doing just fine. [laughs]

Shack: Yeah, they're doing okay. [laughs]

Pete Hines: I don't worry for Valve. In my perfect world, talented people who make good games would have the ability and wherewithal to keep going and keep making good games. I know I have seen independent developers go away that I really liked and respected. Stuff that wasn't really mainstream, but that I played and really took to as different unique. In a perfect world, those guys would also find a way. But at the same time, there are a lot of people making a lot of games. For as much as guys like me complain about there being nothing new to play, there's a lot of stuff being put out on a weekly and monthly basis.

My hope is that those groups won't go away, and do interesting things that publishers pick up and people buy, but honestly at the end of the day there's no one part of the model that you can put your finger on and say, "That's where the problem is." I saw that story about the retailer that's not selling video games anymore, and while I'm not completely aware of everything there, I'm pretty well in tune with what's going on. Some of the stuff they said, maybe certain things were true for just one store, but you and I could name without breaking a sweat a dozen really good games that didn't sell well to anybody in the last year. Games that were good and didn't sell worth a damn. Whose fault is that? You can't blame developers or publishers for doing stuff that's repetitive or more of the same if people don't buy the games that break the mold. Honestly, I don't spend too much time worrying about the industry, it's enough to focus on what we're doing.

Shack: Is the industry--or video games in general--better off now than ten years ago?

Pete Hines: That's a good question, good question. I don't know. I mean, like you said on the PC side, there was so much more stuff out there, really weird stuff that you'd never seen before and never tried before. God, people were doing stuff. But I also know there are a lot of companies that were here ten years ago and aren't here now because those games didn't sell. Not enough people wanted to buy and play them.

I don't know. Some parts are probably better and some parts aren't, but honestly it's pretty much up in the air. Compare the handhelds now to ten years ago. Well, there was Nintendo, and now there's Nintendo. We're still waiting for somebody else. I mean I'm a PSP owner, and I like PSP games, but clearly there aren't as many of those out there. Is that platform going to stick around? Is it going to put up more of a fight against DS? PS3s are sitting on shelves. Are there going to be 100 million PS3s like there were PS2s? For this point in time versus ten years ago, it's a very different situation. There are a lot of question marks right now. I know I'm enjoying working in it though. It's fun for me.

Shack: Well that counts for something. Thanks for your time.

Pete Hines: Absolutely.