The Escapist - Anachronox & Bethesda

The latest Escapist has two articles of interest to us.  The first is titled Ion's Other Game and speaks with Tom Hall about the development of Anachronox and pushing the game out as Ion Storm crumbled:

Anachronox was caught in the slow-motion explosion of a drama bomb. Ion Storm Dallas was busy eating itself, a process chronicled everywhere from NPR to Gamespot to our own magazine, and Tom Hall was caught in the middle. "I had different roles at different times: Chief Creative Officer, President, etc. But, basically, I served as the Project Lead on Anachronox, and, where I could, as conscience of the company." He blames Ion's collapse on the company's lack of focus, or rather, their focus on things other than game development. "Once there was a re-focus on making games - boom, they got done."

The second article looks at the history of Bethesda from the founding by Chris Weaver in 1986:

When Weaver set out to design Arena, the first The Elder Scrolls installment, in 1992, Bethesda had been primarily working the sports game angle: In the six years since Gridiron debuted, six of the 10 games they developed were sports sims, and the other four were adaptations from other media. And throughout the company's life, TES has been their only ongoing in-house, non-sports or original franchise. If Weaver had a baby, Arena was it, and it showed.