By Pete Hines, who once steered publishing at Bethesda, looks back on his quarter-century with the studio with few regrets—yet the notorious Collector’s Edition of Fallout 76 still gnaws at him.
Amid the tidal wave of glitches and PR disasters that swamped Fallout 76, the ultra-pricey Collector’s Edition often fades from memory next to the broken game itself. The $200 Power Armor bundle promised a haul of wasteland merch—think LED headlamp and a wearable T-51b helmet—but the advertised West Tek canvas sack never arrived; buyers opened the box to find a flimsy nylon substitute instead.
“My immediate thought was, ‘Since when did we promise a canvas carrying case?’ The SKU I signed off on never included one,” Hines told DBLTAP, revealing he discovered the switch only after unboxing his own copy. “Someone decided to sweeten the deluxe bundle. We were forever wrestling finance over margins—I’d blow up: ‘We can’t slap a $300 price on this; it’s goddamn offensive.’”
Rather than rush the promised canvas bags to every buyer, Bethesda quietly rewrote the product page on its store, handed out some in-game currency as compensation, and blamed a sudden lack of canvas. The episode still haunts Hines.
“Their intentions were decent—there genuinely was a canvas supply crunch, so a few folks swapped in nylon,” he added. “My gravest misstep was failing to demand we manufacture and ship the real thing to everyone who wanted it. I was too busy stewing that the item had been inserted without my knowledge, and by the time I processed the shortage, the moment passed. It’s likely the stupidest decision I made in my entire Bethesda tenure.”