Starfield Is Bethesda's First Game In Space, But It Almost Wasn't

Long before Starfield, Bethesda actually worked on a doomed-to-fail space sim that never saw the light of day called 10th Planet, a game that would have seen players battling aliens in F-16 fighter jets retrofitted for space combat.

That's all according to Bethesda Softworks veteran Bruce Nesmith in a new interview with MinnMax. Nesmith originally joined Bethesda in 1995, only to later be fired after his work on 10th Planet and rehired by the company years later. He eventually served as the lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and as a senior systems designer for Starfield. Nesmith retired from Bethesda shortly after its parent company, ZeniMax, was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2021.

As Nesmith explains in the interview, the story goes that in the '90s, someone at Bethesda was an acquaintance of Hollywood producer and writer Dean Devlin, perhaps best known for his work on 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Nesmith said Devlin submitted a sci-fi game idea to Bethesda about hostile aliens from a mysterious 10th planet in the solar system that only appeared every 1,000 years due to the planet's extreme hyperbolic orbit.

Humans in the game's universe had settled the solar system and had largely demilitarized. As one might guess, the aliens from the 10th planet weren't exactly friendly, and wanted to conquer all of the solar system, forcing humanity to retrofit aircraft like F-16s for space combat to hold off the invaders.

Nesmith wasn't thrilled with the project, which in the interview he described as having a premise "well-suited to the '80s" despite development on the game having started in the '90s. Bethesda higher-ups wanted 10th Planet to be finished in around nine months, but a year-and-a-half later, the project was still far from ready to ship, according to Nesmith.

He estimates the game was around 50% complete when Bethesda eventually decided to pull the plug on the project, with its space combat and ship customization being in place but lacking a story or even designs for the game's alien combatants. 10th Planet's cancelation led to Nesmith being fired from Bethesda, only to rejoin the company years later when Bethesda's Todd Howard personally reached out.

"It caused serious harm to the nascent Bethesda Softworks at the time, and probably was a contributing factor to them eventually selling to ZeniMax," Nesmith said of 10th Planet's development and cancelation.

Despite some similarities between the two games, 10th Planet never came up during Starfield's development, according to Nesmith, though he admits hiding an Easter egg of a dusty old F-16 would have been a cool addition.

"All we took away from it were the bad feelings of, 'Let's not do anything like that again, let's try and do it right,'" Nesmith said.

Be sure to check out the full MinnMax interview for more fascinating tidbits about Nesmith's career, including why Bethesda decided to announce The Elder Scrolls VI so early.