When you’ve been working on some of the biggest RPGs in gaming industry for example Skyrim, Fallout 3, or Fallout 4, You’ve spent years creating iconic worlds like Diamond City and Little Lamplight.
But even when you enjoy the crafting world like this, sometime the spark starts to fade. The team keeps growing, the meetings multiply like an army of mudcrabs, and you feel like you’re losing the freedom that got you into game dev in the first place.
This is where Nate Purkeypile, Bethesda’s go-to lighting and world artist, found himself And his solution was to walked away to start fresh as a solo dev with his very own studio, Just Purkey Games.
Nate’s going all-in on his first indie game, The Axis Unseen, a game that screams “metal” with every pixel.
Its a heavy metal bowhunting horror game where stealth archery is life. For any of you who went full sneak-archer in Skyrim (don’t lie, we know you did), this is like the ultimate playground.
Only now, there are eerie shadows, towering statues, and ghostly skeletons crawling out of the ground to keep you on your toes.
Nate is pretty open why he leave Bethesda. His reasoning was Bethesda just isn’t the scrappy, fast-moving studio it used to be.
Back in the Fallout 3 and Skyrim days, the team was a tight-knit crew of 65 to 110 people. You could practically toss a dragonborn shout across the room and hit every team member.
But Starfield had ballooned to nearly 500 people, spread across four different studios—Bethesda Game Studios (BGS), BGS Austin, BGS Dallas, and BGS Montreal. If you ever stuck in corporate job you might know what happens when a team gets that big? Meetings.
Endless, soul-crushing meetings.
“It wasn’t the way I liked to build games,” Nate says, nailing why he decided to make the jump.
He’s not the only Bethesda alum who’s felt the growing pains.
Will Shen, Starfield’s lead quest designer, and Daryl Brigner, Fallout 76’s lead level designer, have both mentioned the chaos that comes with a super-sized studio.
Shen even talked about the absurdity of asking for something as simple as a chair—it turns into a full-on quest with multiple steps: Does it need animation? Does it need sound? Is there time in the schedule?
With all of that in the rearview, Nate set out to make a game his own way.
In 2021, he left Bethesda and dove into The Axis Unseen, using Unreal Engine 5 to create a world that’s entirely hand-built.
He didn’t want to go the procedural route, so he crafted each detail from scratch, like a master sculptor with a chisel. And the result? A world that’s about five times the size of Skyrim, dripping with that hardcore, heavy metal vibe.
In this game the landscapes look straight off an album cover—huge sandstone statues, cracked cliffs, giant skeletal monsters lurking in the shadows.
So, now comes the big question: Is it worth leaving a gaming giant like Bethesda to go solo? For Nate, the answer seems like a big, resounding “yes.” And after seeing The Axis Unseen in action, I’m inclined to agree.
He’s taking everything he learned from those years in blockbuster RPGs and putting it into something personal, something with his own stamp on every pixel.
It’s as if he’s telling us, “You know that urge you’ve got to chase your own dreams? Don’t wait.”
If you’re curious, you can check out the demo on Steam and get a taste of the haunting world Nate’s crafted.
Who knows—maybe you’ll find yourself getting lost in the heavy metal wilderness he’s built.
