Bethesda Has a New Logo to Celebrate Its 40th Anniversary — and It Harkens Back to the Studio’s Old Terminator Games

Bethesda has unveiled a new logo to celebrate the studio’s 40th anniversary.

“40 years of adventures” Bethesda said. “Here’s to the worlds we’ve built together… and those still to come. We’re marking the occasion with a logo inspired by our roots.”

That‘s a nod to Bethesda’s early life, long before it became a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media and, later, owned by Microsoft. It wasn’t its first game, but 1991 PC game The Terminator is still fondly remembered by fans old enough to have been messing about with MS-DOS at the time. The Terminator: 2029 followed in 1992, and The Terminator: Rampage in 1993. Simpler times.

The very first The Elder Scrolls video game, by the way, came out in 1994. The Elder Scrolls: Arena would set Bethesda on a patch that would change the game for the studio, and now, over 30 years later, fans are waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6 to come out in… 2028?

Bethesda’s love affair with The Terminator didn’t end with Rampage. The Terminator: Future Shock came out in 1995 (Todd Howard was the producer!). Less than a year later The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall hit PC. Bethesda’s final Terminator game, Skynet, came out in 1996. A generational run.

If you want to know more about Bethesda’s Terminator games, we’ve got an excellent roundup of The Best, Worst, and Weirdest Terminator Games, and there’s plenty of information about how they worked and the industry back then for you to dig into. Here’s a snippet:

There’s no saying what the state of Terminator games would’ve been like had Bethesda continued to develop them, but Skynet would be the studio’s last use of the license. Todd Howard would shift his focus from future wars to high fantasy, acting as project lead for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard – one of the most hated entries in the series – before following that up with Morrowind, which would become one of the most beloved RPGs of all time. No fate but what we make for ourselves!

I do not think Bethesda is all of a sudden going to start making new Terminator games, by the way. This is just a fun nod to the studio’s past. In any case, it has a huge amount to be getting on with. Apart from The Elder Scrolls 6, it’s got Fallout 5, Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters, Obsidian’s new Fallout game, more DLC for Starfield, and ongoing work on Fallout 76 to contend with. All this after Xbox’s recent “reset” of its business and all the layoffs that came with it.

Image credit: Bethesda.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].