V. A little company & a lot of testersIn 1993 Bethesda was already well known, foremost for its hockey games, but still the company was quite small, as Vijay Lakshman described it in 1993: "There are about 12 people. Six programmers, 2 designers and 4 artists. That's it. And of course various other people who come and go on a part-time basis, just help out for specific projects." Bethesda tried to make code as efficient as possible and so Arena was written in ~90% assembler code. A huge number of testers were hired to test games for Bethsoft 8 hours a day and to write bug list. The programmers would fix these bugs during the night and weekends. This is a photo of the Arena development team:
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