Zenimax has filed a new trademark for a mystery unannounced project that we only know about from the trademark name itself: Spyteam.
This trademark was filed in the state of Israel. If you can access their website you see the trademark filing here. This follows a trademark filing in the US Patent and Trademark Office all the way back in 2018, and was approved just last March.
In 2020, Bethesda’s Montreal and Austin studios put up job listings, which are the closest observers can trace for when the studios started working on Spyteam, as well as another prospective game trademarked by Zenimax, Giant Monster News.
Now, it is believed that Bethesda Game Studios Austin in particular is working on Spyteam. Bethesda Game Studios Austin was originally BattleCry Studios, AKA the studio that was supposed to deliver BattleCry, a team based multiplayer game that would have let you play as soldiers from certain historical eras. The last we had reported on BattleCry, Bethesda themselves expressed concerns about the game. Later on, it was confirmed that the game was cancelled.
So how does this all relate to Spyteam? Well, the trademark filing for Spyteam happened at the same time that Bethesda decided to cancel BattleCry, and rename BattleCry studios to simply Bethesda Austin. Spyteam is possibly the reason that Bethesda Game Studios Austin still exists, or it’s the game that gives that studio a reason to keep going beyond simply a support studio.
See, Bethesda Game Studios Austin has been working, but not making new games of their own. They had done support work for DLC for 2016’s Doom, and also did the “additional work” on Fallout 76, probably as the support studio to help deal with that game’s balance and performance issues.
Speculating on what Spyteam could possibly be is most likely a mistake. Following the reveal and release of Hi-Fi Rush, we now know that Bethesda under Microsoft is well capable of delivering games and experiences that we don’t expect. In the same way that gamers followed the Hi-Fi Rush name for years but had no idea what it would eventually turn out to be, whatever speculation we could make for Spyteam could be asily undone by its actual reveal.
At the very least, its description does confirm that it will be a video game, that can be playable on PCs, consoles, and possibly mobile. The name implies it will have a spy or James Bond theme, but that’s probably the extent that we can reasonably say we know about it.
