5 Best Bethesda Games Everyone Forgot

Bethesda Softworks has been making games since the mid-80s, but didn’t really become a household name until The Elder Scrolls series caught on with fans. Still, that’s decades of development to pull from, so it’s fair to say Bethesda has plenty of forgotten gems that players hardly talk about these days. The list below details the five best of those games, though it’s important to note that Bethesda has also become a major publisher in addition to its development efforts. With that in mind, I’ve included a few games the studio has published to give a broader view of Bethesda’s impressive catalog.

Here are Bethesda’s five best underrated games.

5) Gridiron!

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Gridirion! is not a looker. In fact, you wouldn’t be wrong to call it “boring” or even “ugly.” It’s basically a moving football playbook that lets you go up against a friend from a top-down perspective.

What Bethesda’s first game lacks in graphical fidelity, it makes up for with its in-depth simulation of the sport. Players can fully customize their playbook, giving them the potential to create something truly groundbreaking. Again, it doesn’t look great, but the top-down perspective lets players quickly understand formations and play types, making it a great tool for teaching football.

It was billed as one of the best-selling sports games on the Amiga and helped set the stage for Madden. EA published Gridiron!, and you can see some of the technical groundwork that would eventually become the best-selling football sim.

4) Protector

Protector is an Atari Jaguar game, so you shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that it only sold about 100 copies in its first year. There just weren’t that many Jaguars on the market. However, the lack of sales doesn’t mean that Protector wasn’t a solid effort from Bethesda.

Protector is a scrolling shooter in the vein of Defender. Players command the Starblade against waves of invading aliens, playing through more than 40 levels to reach the end. Look, there weren’t many good games on the Jaguar, but Protector might be the best one. If you’re looking for a historical artifact that feels like a step-up on Defender 2000, Protector is worth checking out.

3) Brink

Brink is the game on the list that was only published by Bethesda. Splash Damage was the lead developer for this first-person shooter that put a heavy focus on parkour movement. Critically, Brink didn’t do so hot. Reviewers called it “incomplete,” but noted that the skeleton of a great shooter was in there.

That said, the community took to it. Brink sold over 2.5 million units. The shooter is an ambitious take on a multiplayer shooter, but it didn’t quite live up to its potential. Mixing parkour movement with Team Fortress 2-like shooting should’ve been great. Instead, it’s much closer to good.

Splash Damage has gone on to work on the multiplayer modes for Gears of War 4 and 5, so the team is still working in the multiplayer shooter genre. I’m not saying a Brink sequel will ever happen, but you never know.

2) The Evil Within 2

Tango Gameworks was formed by legendary Resident Evil developer Shinji Mikami in 2010. He almost immediately jumped back into the survival horror genre with The Evil Within, which is a mostly middling horror game that struggled with consistency.

Mikami stepped out of the director’s chair for the sequel and let John Johanas take over while he worked as an executive producer. That turned out to be a great mix for the studio, as The Evil Within 2 solved most of the issues the first game had, giving publisher Bethesda one of the best survival horror games of the 2010s.

The sequel was one of the biggest turnarounds we’ve seen in the last decade. Nobody thought a second game would even happen, but when it did, we were treated to a thrilling psychological horror game that showed Tango Gameworks had chops. While Ghostwire: Tokyo didn’t quite live up to the hype, Hi-Fi Rush was one of the surprise hits of 2023, though the studio was briefly shuttered after its release before being brought back from the dead by Krafton in 2024.

1) The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall

If you think in-game maps are big these days, let me introduce you to Daggerfall. The second Elder Scrolls game’s map is 63,000 square miles. For reference, that is larger than more than half of the US States. And it’s not even the largest map in the series, as the first game, Arena, technically spans 6 million square miles, though most of it is randomly generated.

Beyond comparing map sizes, Daggerfall is notable for introducing many key series elements. You don’t level up by earning experience points. Instead, your skills improve as you use them. You can create your own class, giving you plenty of leeway in how you build a character. Daggerfall even introduced the ability to create your own spell, upping that customization even further.

Daggerfall absolutely cleaned up in Game of the Year awards. Arena is what put Bethesda on the map as a major player in the RPG space, but Daggerfall solidified its spot among the elite. Really, the only thing working against Daggerfall and Arena is that every game in the series is era-defining in its own way. It’s hard for modern players to get too excited about Daggerfall when Skyrim was just as successful at revolutionizing RPG design.

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