Bethesda on not-quite-successes: "Nothing is a hundred percent in this industry"

The top of the charts is hardly Bethesda's Everest. The ever-growing publisher has scaled those lofty heights time and time again - typically clinging to the back of something Fallout or Elder Scrolls-related. Nobody's perfect, though. For every Fallout 3, there's a WET or Rogue Warrior. And Pete Hines is refreshingly honest about that. Don't think, however, that he regrets the time, money, and resources his company put into those geese that laid regular eggs.

"I'll admit this freely, I was the first guy or certainly one of the few guys who saw Wet at Bethesda. I was like, 'That's really cool. It's very different.' It's not a home run. You don't look at it and go: 'There's no way that won't be a commercial smash.' The graphics were not the highest end graphics of the day, but it had a quality, it had personality, it had an edge to it," he told, er, Edge.

"The reason that I know it's the kind of game that we would do is that when it came out, I took it home. And despite all the press tours and all the trade show that I had gone to where I had demoed the game and talked about it, I played it every night until I finished it and had a really good time. I had some spots where I got frustrated and emailed the designer the next morning saying, 'I'm going to kill you for the skydiving level!' But it was a fun, innovative game that did some really interesting things."

Hines added that the Bethesda of today is more focused than ever on making players say, "That's really a game I can't afford to miss." Even so, simple, non-mind-blowing fun has its place.

"Nothing is a hundred percent in this industry, you know. Wet could have done better but honestly for us it did pretty well... It sold quite a few copies for what it was. It wasn't Fallout 3, but not everything is."

He's right, you know. Oh yes, yes, about that last thing. Definitely. But we were referring to the skydiving level. That freaking level. Put simply, we embedded our controller so deeply in drywall that knights now journey from across realms to take a crack at wrenching it free. So far, none have succeeded. Honestly, we should probably just buy a new controller.