Long before Starfield, Bethesda actually worked on a doomed-to-fail space sim that never saw the light of day called 10th Planet, a game that would have seen players battling aliens in F-16 fighter jets retrofitted for space combat.

That's all according to Bethesda Softworks veteran Bruce Nesmith in a new interview with MinnMax. Nesmith originally joined Bethesda in 1995, only to later be fired after his work on 10th Planet and rehired by the company years later. He eventually served as the lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and as a senior systems designer for Starfield. Nesmith retired from Bethesda shortly after its parent company, ZeniMax, was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2021.

As Nesmith explains in the interview, the story goes that in the '90s, someone at Bethesda was an acquaintance of Hollywood producer and writer Dean Devlin, perhaps best known for his work on 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Nesmith said Devlin submitted a sci-fi game idea to Bethesda about hostile aliens from a mysterious 10th planet in the solar system that only appeared every 1,000 years due to the planet's extreme hyperbolic orbit.