Ask the creative catalyst behind sprawling, bestselling games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 about his breakthrough moment, and he'll tell you a story about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
That was Bethesda Softworks' first stab at handcrafting a hyper-detailed fantasy world, as opposed to the procedurally generated lands of previous games in the role-playing series. Morrowind won dozens of awards and shattered Bethesda sales records, but more than half of those plaudits almost never happened: When Microsoft approached Todd Howard about putting Morrowind on its Xbox console, he balked.
"I was like 'Ehhh, we’ll see,'" Howard says, "'but I don’t think the game’s going to work, because I'm not sure the console audience wants what we do.'"
When Microsoft announced the Xbox in March 2000, Morrowind was in the middle of development. The Elder Scrolls games had until then been PC-only affairs, following the wisdom of the time that deep role-playing experiences happened in cloistered home offices, computing tabernacles with click-clacked keyboards and mice, and not casually tapped out on gamepads in living rooms.
Fortunately for Bethesda, it did risk an Xbox version, which launched one month after the PC game in June 2002. Then, the thing no one expected to happen happened: Morrowind went on to become one of the console's best-selling games, right up there with Madden NFL and Grand Theft Auto. The previous game had "sold fine," according to Howard, but Bethesda was on the verge of shuttering. Morrowind's millions of sales—the majority of them on Xbox, not PC—might have saved it.
"To have the Xbox version do better than the PC version, I could have never fathomed that at the time," says Howard. "It told us we don’t have to change who we are, we can make our kind of game and this audience wants it as well."
Not changing who it is has proved lucrative for Bethesda, which still makes its home in its namesake city in Maryland. Howard's turn directing Fallout 3, the company's acclaimed attempt to graft its world-building ideas onto Interplay's beloved post-apocalpytic role-playing series, moved over 12 million copies. And The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Howard's directorial project after Morrowind, nearly doubled that figure, driving the game far enough into the mainstream that it earned a surreal shoutout in an episode of primetime television darling NCIS.
On November 10, Howard's latest project arrived like a thunderclap: Fallout 4 is the biggest game his team has ever made, a Skyrim-sized post-nuclear world brimming with more than 100,000 lines of spoken dialogue, coupled to a mammoth crafting system fed by all those wasteland odds and ends players can pluck from dilapidated desks and derelict trashcans.
It's also filled with visual motifs inspired by Norman Rockwell paintings, John Ford movies, and, Howard tells me, references to director Doug Liman's sci-fi time-looper Edge of Tomorrow.
"I think it's a wildly underrated movie," he says. "I just saw it again the other day, so everyone I'm seeing lately I remind them, 'Have you seen Edge of Tomorrow?' There's actually a lot of Fallout in that. If you look in Fallout 4, you'll know it when you see it."
Howard says his other non-gaming influences include the Star Wars films and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. But like most forty-something designers who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when personal computers were embryonic and expensive curios, his formative experiences transpired crouched in front of electric green screens like that of his first computer, an Apple II.
"Once you have a device like that, it's not just playing games on it, it's because you can crack it open and do your own things," he says. "That immediately became my outlet, to see what I could make the machine do."
Howard had fooled with a Star Trek game and "a couple others" on the TRS-80, Tandy's 1977 personal desktop, lovingly (or not) referred to as the "trash eighty." But when he thinks of the Apple II, he says it's of Ultima, the beloved open-world fantasy series.
"I think if someone has a gaming obsession, Ultima became mine," says Howard. "I would say no other series ingrained itself in how I want to make games or what I want them to be more than Ultima did."
And it wasn't any one Ultima game, says Howard, but the way series creator Richard Garriott managed to keep the story and game concepts vibrant during the decade between 1983's Ultima III: Exodus and 1993's Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle. In Ultima VII, for instance, players could pick up virtually any object not nailed down, bake bread, milk cows, play music instruments, even change diapers—at the time, an unparalleled push for player agency.
"Those are kind of my defining years, you know—you’re going through senior high, then through college," he says. "That’s where I have an Apple II, I get a PC, I’m messing around and doing those things, and it wasn’t a conscious thing, but like, this is what’s good about gaming. This is what makes, at the time, computer games special. I mean I played everything, but the games that kept me up and night and tickled my fancy were the larger role-playing games like Ultima."
At some point that led Howard, matriculated at a Virginia college where he was double-majoring in engineering and finance, to go job-hunting. The closest game studio/publisher? Bethesda, just a few hours up the road outside D.C.
"Most people write this up slightly wrong, unless there’s a video of me saying it," says Howard when asked how he got into turning out gaming's equivalents of War and Peace.
"I'd been playing everything, and decided that this was something I maybe wanted to make a career out of. I knew where some companies were, but I saw the name Bethesda, Maryland on Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3. I was going to school in Virginia, and so I came up to the office, and I remember it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Monday in January, and no one was really here. So I knocked on the door and said 'Hey, I saw your address, and I want to work here one day.'"
Someone came out of the building to talk to him, says Howard, but only to tell him to come back when he was out of school.
"Which I did," he says. "And they still didn't have any positions. But the next time one opened up, they said 'We have something, come in for an interview.' And I came in, and they hired me. But they'd seen me a few times by then, and I'd kind of kept in touch."
His first job? Working on the CD-ROM version of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This was early 1994, and the inaugural entry in Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series had just shipped on a handful of floppy disks. Howard joined as the CD-ROM version's "producer," but says it really amounted to long days spent play-testing and bug-squashing.
"CD-ROMs had just come out, and they were seen as bringing games to a lot more people because you could do video," he explains. "The company had just gotten some Silicon Graphics machines, Jurassic Park had just come out, and so we were doing a better intro and cutscenes, better sound effects, and all those things. But mostly I spent my days playing Arena and writing up any issues that affected the CD-ROM version. I played that game to death for awhile, and I still love it to this day. Despite its age and size, I think it's a very elegant game. It knows what it is, and does it very, very well."
Howard's next project for Bethesda involved creating a game in the Terminator franchise, called Future Shock. The company had released two other Terminator games, a pair of primitive shooters, prior to Howard's arrival, but neither had been critically successful. Howard's idea was to craft a fully 3-D first-person shooter, but with huge levels you might spend as much time exploring as gunning through.
It was also the first game—ever—to let you use the mouse to freely look around at all times, a full year before id Software's Quake.
"They started me on Future Shock, I don't know why. I guess they saw something I didn't. I was very eager," says Howard. "And Future Shock was really great because the license for the Terminator movies was in this weird limbo, so there was no one to tell us yes or no, no one to check in with, and we were able to do whatever we wanted, which I think made the game a lot better. I have great memories of that project. And then Quake comes out and everybody forgets Future Shock, which is what it is, understandably so. But that game has a real sweet spot for a lot of us."
The other thing almost no one knows, in part because Future Shock is such a forgotten title, is that this is where Howard and Bethesda really figured out how to build vast, inhabitable worlds.
"We wanted these big, even in those days, expansive levels you could explore," explains Howard. "The way we built Future Shock, you have a height map and instanced 3-D objects rendering on top—that, believe it or not, is still how we build today. It's our basic paradigm for how to build a space. You can follow it forward from Future Shock, because you're doing full 3-D, the height map, and the instanced objects connected together on top of it. It's still what we do now."
Howard is obsessed with revisiting the obvious, the done over and over again, the seemingly mundane. He wants to reinvigorate dull-sounding gameplay tropes, attacking them from angles no one else has, translating a kind of Platonic ideal experience into a gameplay system that resonates with and beyond Bethesda's fans.
"For me, I'm always wanting to create the thing that was in my head while I was doing it," says Howard. "If I'm playing Dungeons & Dragons and things are happening, I have a certain image of what is actually happening. So I enjoy crafting the basics, like say you have a sword and shield and you're going to fight a skeleton. If you were to pitch that as a design, most people would yawn. But I find a lot of joy in making that come to life, in making that feel as exciting as possible. Even right now as we're talking, I can think of 10 ways to do it better than we've ever done it."
Take Skyrim, a game mostly about battling dragons. Howard says the team's initial response was hesitant, basically worried that dragons were to fantasy games (and stories, and movies) as the opener "It was a dark and stormy night" is to florid, clichéd prose.
"And I told them, I don't know, I haven't really experienced dragons in an open game like this. Not in a way that made me really in the awe of what the thing can do, or the power I get from killing it," he says. "Or in Fallout, it's that moment of stepping out of the vault and going into that world, I just think that's a great feeling. There's a lot of excitement for me in finding a way to make that all feel like something you've felt before, but at the same time all new, because the technology changes, and the audience also changes."
Design luminary Shigeru Miyamoto said a few years ago that he planned to step back from his iconic franchises to focus on smaller projects with tiny teams. After watching Howard build Western gaming's cathedral-equivalents for more than two decades, it feels like a natural question to ask: would Howard ever to deign to design small?
"The timing of your question, because we just wrapped up Fallout 4, I definitely need a break," he responds. "But that's normal. And after that, I just see so many things that we could do. I like to make big games, the team likes to make big games. We have lots of ideas. We plan on taking a break and coming back and finding out where those ideas take us."
"But no—we definitely don't plan on making small things."
