Bethesda Softworks, the studio behind popular open-world role playing games like "Fallout 3" and "The Elder Scrolls" series, announced this week that it was officially done producing additional downloadable content (DLC) for "Skryim" in order to make room for its "next adventure." And while fans and critics alike met the news of "Skyrim's" end with a tinge of melancholy, many gamers no doubt wanted to know what, exactly, this "next adventure" will be.
Bethesda answered the question in the form of a four-second Vine clip with no introduction.
"CONSIDER YOURSELF TEASED," Jason Bergman, a senior producer at Bethesda who worked on "Fallout: New Vegas," added a few minutes later on Twitter.
And with that single four-second clip, the game-friendly part of the Internet was sent scurrying for clues and radical interpretations.
The Vine video shows a rotating image of barbed wire followed by a rotating image of a vinyl LP, "Planned program service program no. 416" by The Moonbeam Trio and directed by George Shackley, called "Planned program service program no. 416." The video then ends with several rapid cuts showing a piece of sheet music for "Air on the G-String," a song by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The only sound that plays throughout the entire four seconds is a slow grating noise that kind of sounds like a record needle scratching an LP.
This kind of musical and visual motif has been a mainstay of the "Fallout" franchise, which got many gamers wondering if Bethesda was hinting at another possible sequel to the post-apocalyptic RPG. But Pete Hines, Bethesda's vice president of public relations and marketing, quickly quashed any speculation about a new "Fallout" game when he told Polygon's Arthur Gies to "guess again."
Fans will no doubt continue to dissect the four-second video clip indefinitely, but Bethesda is waiting to give any more information about its next venture.
