Bethesda explains why they didn't support Nintendo in the past, says Nintendo requested less violent games, and shoots down port requests

Bethesda's Pete Hines addressed a number of Nintendo-related topics during his time at PAX AUS this year. We've already covered their early access to the Switch, and plans for games like Wolfenstein and Doom Eternal going forward. Now we have some talk about working with Nintendo in general, as well as potential projects. Check out each section below.

Bethesda's lack of support on past Nintendo platforms

So the idea of being able to take something like what we did, looking at the tech specs, and going, ‘That’s actually really close to like what we kind of do now.’ That was always the big barrier for us with Nintendo stuff. It wasn’t that we didn’t like the Wii or we don’t like this, it was just this is the stuff that we make, and as many things as will run that, we’ll do it. So as we looked at the specs, we started looking at games like Skyrim and Doom and Wolfenstein, and we were fortunate enough to either have really talented devs who were also very keen on making it which I think is important or finding a great partner in Panic Button who had the ability to take what we were doing and say, ‘Yeah we can make that happen on a Switch.’

And we just think it’s a really cool piece of tech… Nintendo still does really well with Nintendo things. Don’t get me wrong. Everybody else is a distant second, but you can still be in really good shape being a distant second on the Switch because so many people are buying it and playing it, and so again, they’ve been great partners with us, they’ve been very enthusiastic. And we’re very enthusiastic. Again to my point, that’s a whole audience that really doesn’t know us very well in terms of games on their platforms, so the chance to bring what it is we do to them has been awesome and fun and rewarding and we’re going to keep doing it.”

Nintendo asking for games with less blood and violence

“Well I can tell you one of the first things they said was, ‘Hey, do you have anything where there’s not a lot of blood and violence? Because there’s a lot of blood and violence.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, there’s this (Fallout) Shelter thing, it’s cute and cartoony – we’ll do that too.’ But our belief – and it has been proven out in discussions with them as recently as… either last week or the week before – they came out and we caught up with them and in terms of their demographics, getting older. Guys like us are still playing games and playing stuff on Switch, so their stuff has traditionally skewed pretty young, but you can start to seeing that curve moving up, 18 to 24. I’m really close to that 50 and up bracket and like it used to be that there were no people in that age range for Nintendo devices, and now there is, and it turns out there’s a pretty good number and those folks are looking to play games. So having stuff that’s more mature both serves them really well and helps us continue to serve an audience that’s looking for games, that has disposable income, that says, ‘OK, I’ve played Zelda, I’ve played Super Mario World, what else is there for me to do?'”

Finally, were are some quick tidbits that were shared about potential projects.

- Bethesda knows people want Fallout 3 on Switch
- Hines says that remasters/ports these types of projects are unlikely
- this is because it takes a lot of work to get older games working on new platforms
- Bethesda's dev teams are more interested in working on new projects