Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it’s ‘much less stressful as an indie’ without daily meetings or ‘office politics’: it’s ‘very refreshing to just care about the game’

Even if you haven’t yet played Nate Purkeypile’s most recent game, “heavy metal horror” hunting game The Axis Unseen, you’ve probably played at least one of his games at some point.

Purkeypile, founder of Just Purkey Games, worked on BloodRayne 2, Aeon Flux, and Metroid Prime 3, then spent a full 14 years at Bethesda Game Studios where he was a lead artist and world artist on games like Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76.

During the development of Starfield, however, Purkeypile left Bethesda to create his own studio. I caught up with him at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, and asked about his experience of going from a team of over 500 to a studio that is pretty much just him.

“It was time, I had been there so long, and Starfield wasn’t super my thing,” Purkeypile said. “I mostly went there for Fallout, which worked out great, since 10 of those years were just Fallout games.”

I asked him if at any point after leaving Bethesda he had any second thoughts or doubts.

“No,” he said bluntly, then laughed. “Honestly, it has been so much less stressful as an indie even though it’s like, ‘Yes, I’m not making any money until I ship something.’

“Not having to have those daily meetings all the time and constantly trying to push things through all the office politics and approval layers… it was very refreshing to just care about the game,” he said.

Even taking vacation time while at Bethesda didn’t really feel like vacation, Purkeypile told me. “That’s not really time off. You come back and have like, 1000 emails you have to respond to, and you’re like, oh, I just pushed work down [the road]. It’s not a real vacation, right?”

Purkeypile wasn’t just part of a smaller team while making The Axis Unseen, he was essentially a solo dev. “I contracted out some writing and the music and some drawings,” he said, “but I was the only one making the systems and all the world art and animation, creatures, you name it.”

While it’s clear that Purkeypile doesn’t miss the red tape and daily meetings of triple-A development, what about the collaboration with other artists and designers?

“I worked with a lot of really good people who I wouldn’t mind working with again,” he said. “So people ask me if I would go back to triple-A? Not necessarily, but I would work with a lot of those people I worked with because they’re all really talented, but a lot of them have moved on as well.”