Pete Hines on Bethesda’s relationship with Nintendo, exclusives and Smash Bros.
Pete Hines, Bethesda’s vice president of PR and marketing, recently spoke to UK newspaper Metro. Among other things, they talked about the recently successful relationship between Bethesda and Nintendo on the Switch. Here’s what Hines had to say on that:
Well, here’s the thing. We’ve always gotten on well with Nintendo, it’s just a question of do the games that we make… technically are they a fit for the platforms that they’re making? In the past the simple answer has been no. Like, Skyrim did not run on anything that Nintendo was making. Could we have changed a bunch of stuff to make it work? Maybe. But that’s not our approach. But in the case of the Switch the game as we made it, does it run on this? Yeah, it does! It runs well. And so Skryim, Wolf, Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Shelter, Legends – all of those things are things we’ve said, ‘Look, this either can or will run well on a Switch’. And we continue to look at every game that we make, because we want as many people to play it as possible. I have my Switch with me here in Germany, I think it’s great to be able to take games you love with you.
On the topic of a Switch-exclusive game made by Bethesda, possibly using Nintendo characters in the vein of Mario + Rabbids:
We’re always having conversations with them, but again those conversations wouldn’t necessarily take place with me, they’d take place with a dev to say, ‘We have an idea for a this or a that and we wanna do a game that is a crossover with the Switch’.
Finally, the interviewer couldn’t resist asking whether Bethesda has talked to Nintendo about Smash Bros. Hines simply said the following:
