Famed video game director Todd Howard breaks down his storied career at Bethesda Game Studios. From his first game in 1995, The Terminator: Future Shock, to his newest IP in almost thirty years, Starfield, the Skyrim, Daggerfall, and Fallout creator highlights a timeline of the games he's produced, designed and directed for an ever-developing gaming industry.
Director: Sean Dacanay
Director of Photography: Benjamin Finkel
Editor: Brady Jackson
Talent: Todd Howard
Creative Producer: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: D. Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Larry Greenblatt
Sound Mixer: Marianna LaFollette
Production Assistant: Sage Ellis
Hair & Make-Up: Andrea Hines
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Graphics Supervisor: Ross Rackin
Designer: Léa Kichler
Director: Sean Dacanay
Director of Photography: Benjamin Finkel
Editor: Brady Jackson
Talent: Todd Howard
Creative Producer: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: D. Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Larry Greenblatt
Sound Mixer: Marianna LaFollette
Production Assistant: Sage Ellis
Hair & Make-Up: Andrea Hines
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Graphics Supervisor: Ross Rackin
Designer: Léa Kichler
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00 I am Todd Howard here at Bethesda Game Studios.
00:03 You might know me from games like Skyrim,
00:06 the Fallout series, and now Starfield.
00:08 And I'm here to talk to Wired
00:10 about some of the games that we've made.
00:12 What people don't know about this game
00:23 is one of the first full 3D shooters
00:28 where you look at controls today with mouse-look controls
00:31 and using WSAD.
00:32 This is the first PC game to ever do it.
00:35 I had just started at Bethesda.
00:39 This is in the mid-'90s.
00:41 Team sizes were small.
00:42 We're talking like 10 people, 12 people, tops.
00:45 Everybody had to do a lot of different things.
00:47 So I did a bit of programming.
00:48 I was producing. I did level design.
00:51 I became the sound effects guy.
00:53 What's fun with this is the old manual
00:57 that came with the game.
00:58 And there's a sketch in the back.
01:02 There's a lot of cool artwork here.
01:04 And one of our concept artists
01:05 did a sketch of the core team here,
01:08 positioned as if we were the resistance
01:11 in the Terminator world.
01:13 And there's me in the back.
01:14 And I remember David Plunkett here,
01:16 the artist who drew it, just said,
01:17 "Todd, I gave you the biggest gun."
01:19 Whenever you're on a team,
01:24 even if it's four people or 400 people,
01:26 learning how to use everybody's skills
01:29 and work together is what gets you the best game.
01:31 So a couple of these games,
01:34 starting with Terminator,
01:36 is the beginnings for me at Bethesda.
01:39 And there's a couple of different phases and chapters
01:42 in terms of the games we made,
01:43 the platforms that we're on,
01:45 and how everybody worked together.
01:56 Daggerfall is a game where so much of it
01:59 is a giant procedural world
02:02 where we're relying on the computer
02:04 to generate all of the content
02:06 and put the individual things that we had built
02:09 kind of in smart places around the world.
02:11 Think about 3D today.
02:13 That work is being done by GPUs.
02:16 Here, it's all done in the CPU.
02:18 How we built the world is we have a height map
02:20 where you get a bunch of vertices at a certain period,
02:24 and then you're building a height map for the landscape,
02:26 and then instancing, building 3D objects
02:29 that get replicated over and over on that height map.
02:32 And believe it or not, it's how we build games today.
02:35 It also pushes for us as we do role-playing games
02:38 what kind of character that you're gonna create.
02:41 So Daggerfall's character system
02:43 really is this jump up in terms of defining yourself,
02:46 what are the advantages of your character,
02:48 what are the disadvantages of your character,
02:51 and brings in for the first time
02:52 the Elder Scrolls skill system
02:55 that so many people know now from games like Skyrim.
02:58 And this game had a lot of success,
03:00 really brought the Elder Scrolls to a new audience.
03:03 Redguard is the first game
03:11 that I was the main project leader on.
03:15 Didn't do that well.
03:16 It's the last kind of DOS-based PC game that we made.
03:21 It might be one of the last DOS games.
03:23 It's right when 3D acceleration starts coming out.
03:26 Really didn't hit a technology window or a gameplay style.
03:30 It's listed as an adventure game,
03:32 but it's a true genre mashup.
03:34 It has some adventure game elements.
03:35 It has action game elements.
03:36 It has some role-playing elements.
03:38 I guess you could say at that time
03:40 we started making a lot of games instead of focusing,
03:43 and none of them turned out really, really great.
03:46 And the company was in a really difficult position
03:50 financially, and I did feel responsible,
03:53 and I kind of stepped back from it and said,
03:55 it's a really good game.
03:57 Where did it not resonate?
03:58 What's the takeaway?
03:59 And it was just too conservative.
04:02 We made a very, very small game.
04:04 I think it's well-crafted,
04:05 but we weren't as ambitious as we could have been,
04:08 and not what our audience we'd had at the time
04:12 from Daggerfall and Arena really wanted from us
04:16 when it came to the Elder Scrolls.
04:18 The company's struggling.
04:20 We probably have one more shot
04:22 if we're gonna stay in business, so let's go all in.
04:25 The company was kind of sold to ZeniMax Media,
04:36 a new company, and reformed around that.
04:38 The decision came down, we're gonna have one team.
04:41 It's gonna be under Todd, and we're gonna do Morrowind.
04:44 We aimed very high.
04:45 We were very, very ambitious to bring back the Elder Scrolls
04:48 with a core team that we had had,
04:50 but taking the learnings from a game like Redguard,
04:53 where we are hand-building a world,
04:56 but now we're doing it on a larger scale
04:58 compared to the games people know today.
05:00 It's actually still very, very small,
05:03 but it's very, very detailed.
05:04 The other big thing that comes with Morrowind,
05:07 we finally took it to console.
05:09 So if we go back to the year 2000,
05:11 Microsoft is thinking about creating the Xbox.
05:14 And technically, it was great for us, right?
05:17 It's a very PC-styled console.
05:19 It has a hard drive, so many things
05:21 that we would be looking for in a console.
05:23 And the big question was, how do we translate the controls
05:26 and all of those things?
05:27 Fortunately, we are all here today,
05:31 because this game was a huge success.
05:33 I was stunned.
05:35 Obviously, it did well on the PC,
05:37 but on Xbox at the time,
05:38 it became the second best-selling game behind Halo.
05:42 [SPLASHING]
05:44 Instead of coming out with a quick sequel to Morrowind,
05:53 why don't we take four years
05:55 and really go ambitious again for the next console
05:59 with hardware that doesn't exist?
06:01 Team size now is getting up to around 60, 70 people.
06:06 And this is a game where the core group from Morrowind
06:10 was still here. We could build on that and be ambitious.
06:13 We changed the technology hugely again,
06:16 getting into pixel shaders, having to guess on hardware.
06:19 So whenever you're doing technology
06:21 in your own side of masses of amounts of content
06:24 and art and design,
06:25 and then you have a moving hardware target,
06:27 it's the most difficult game development
06:30 or any type of exercise that you could do as it comes to tech.
06:33 There was a moment we were making the game with Xbox
06:36 where that console didn't have as much memory as we wanted.
06:40 And when they finally called us and told us
06:41 that they were doubling the memory on the console
06:44 they were shipping, we threw a party here.
06:46 And I have never seen programmers
06:49 look so happy in my entire life.
06:51 This was a game that, for many reasons,
06:56 it vaulted us to an audience we had never expected to see
07:01 on the PC and the Xbox.
07:03 It comes out later on PlayStation.
07:06 And it really starts this other era of games for us,
07:10 the 360 era.
07:11 We were asked, "What else does the team wanna do?
07:18 What do you wanna do, Todd?"
07:19 It'd be good to have more than one franchise
07:22 or one game every four to five years.
07:24 At the top of our list was "Fallout."
07:26 It was a series that we had loved
07:28 that had come out a while ago,
07:29 and we were able to get the license.
07:31 This game comes out, I believe,
07:32 about two and a half years only after "Oblivion."
07:35 It uses a very similar technology base that we had built.
07:39 It's our second game on the Xbox 360.
07:42 One of the things that happens with games
07:44 is knowing your tools, knowing the level of technology,
07:46 and getting your whole team used to working with that
07:50 pays big dividends.
07:51 It was also really special
07:52 because we're picking up a franchise
07:54 that we hadn't worked in before.
07:56 It's very new for us, it's very exciting,
07:58 but how is it gonna resonate when we translate,
08:01 basically, somebody else's work the way we would do it
08:04 or the style of game that we enjoyed best?
08:06 And this game was even more popular than "Oblivion."
08:09 Some of that audience came with us,
08:12 and it also found an all-new audience,
08:14 because yes, there's post-apocalyptic things
08:16 in movies and literature and games, obviously,
08:19 but really, there's nothing like "Fallout."
08:23 It's the world before the bombs fall,
08:25 this world where the view of the nuclear future
08:30 is this utopia that then gets destroyed.
08:32 And it also has my favorite beginning of a game,
08:36 this idea that when you leave the vault,
08:38 you had spent your whole life there,
08:40 and how do you make the player feel that way?
08:42 So us jumping through this montage
08:44 of these periods of your life,
08:46 I think it's on your first birthday in the game,
08:49 when you're a baby and you're able to walk around,
08:51 you press the button and the baby says, "Da-da."
08:54 That's actually my son on his first birthday
08:57 that I recorded saying that back to me,
09:00 so very special game for me.
09:03 And that sits right with "Oblivion."
09:05 Well, I think the one we're best known for is "Skyrim."
09:14 Now the team has grown.
09:15 Now we're about 100 people,
09:17 and you're looking at a team that grew from "Morrowind"
09:19 to "Oblivion" to "Fallout 3" and then to "Skyrim."
09:22 We were really firing on all cylinders in "Skyrim,"
09:25 and it shows.
09:27 We also started pushing the modding community.
09:30 Modding is when you modify a game.
09:33 You take it, you change something.
09:34 People wanna create their own adventures
09:36 or artwork or anything.
09:38 Our games allow it.
09:39 We're huge fans of it.
09:40 It's kind of how I started,
09:42 back on the Apple II, changing other games.
09:44 It's still a complicated role-playing game,
09:47 but the number of people who had never played
09:49 a game like ours, or some people not even any video game,
09:53 they came to "Skyrim."
09:56 So that right there is kind of that 360 era
09:59 for us with our role-playing games,
10:01 where they find an audience
10:03 that we never, ever expected to find,
10:06 a level of popularity,
10:07 and us here learning how to make these games.
10:10 The team's about 110 or so after "Skyrim,"
10:14 and we set our sights on the next "Fallout."
10:25 "Skyrim" is the first creation engine game
10:28 where we had redone a lot of the technology
10:30 that then feeds into "Fallout 4."
10:33 New scripting system,
10:34 how we're handling all of the NPCs and the AI,
10:38 the era of Xbox One, right?
10:40 Where the technology level jumps up again,
10:43 and we had a very, very dynamic world with this game.
10:46 If you look back in Morrowind,
10:48 we have NPCs that feel believable for that era,
10:52 but they're pretty much standing around.
10:53 They're signposts.
10:55 As we go into "Oblivion," we push that.
10:57 The NPCs could wander around.
10:59 They had day/night schedules.
11:00 They went to bed.
11:01 You could poison them by stealing all the food,
11:03 and then just putting poison apples around.
11:05 They would decide to eat that.
11:06 "Fallout 4," it does feel like a good action game
11:10 in your hands, but it has those RPG systems.
11:12 Everything can be used for crafting
11:15 or used in some respect.
11:17 So everything you pick up has these base components.
11:20 Build your own settlements, modify your guns,
11:22 modify your power armor.
11:24 Minute to minute, I think "Fallout 4"
11:26 is a huge success for us,
11:27 for just how a game feels in your hands.
11:30 So we have "Fallout 4," and then really an offshoot
11:33 of "Fallout 4" that is multiplayer.
11:35 Every game we do, everyone asks us to do multiplayer.
11:42 We usually decide, obviously, not to.
11:44 With "Fallout 4," we had gotten inspired
11:46 by these online survival games a lot of us were playing.
11:49 We said, "Well, if we ever did multiplayer for 'Fallout,'
11:52 "that's how we would do it."
11:53 You know, borrows a lot of systems from "Fallout 4."
11:56 It's the first game, really, where we do that,
11:59 where you can see things from the previous game
12:02 almost directly in it.
12:03 You know, it's a brand new type of game,
12:05 and I think as people know, we struggled.
12:08 And despite its issues, we had a lot of successes.
12:10 We built our own online platform from scratch.
12:14 Sold really well.
12:15 We had a core audience playing the game,
12:18 despite its problems, who were telling us,
12:20 "We love this. Please fix it."
12:23 We joined with our community in having that communication
12:26 about what would make the game better,
12:27 how do we go about it,
12:29 and us here learning how to get in a cadence
12:33 and continue to update a game,
12:36 put our heads down, do the hard work.
12:38 And today, five years later,
12:41 it is one of our most played games,
12:43 now a very big success for us,
12:45 both in terms of what it's doing for players,
12:48 but also it made us much, much better developers
12:52 going through a difficult process.
12:54 This is an all-new experience,
13:02 the most ambitious game that we've made,
13:05 and the scale of it dwarfs everything
13:07 that we had done so far.
13:09 For a long time, we wanted to do a space game,
13:13 something that I've wanted to do for a long time,
13:16 and something new outside of "Fallout" and "Elder Scrolls,"
13:18 an IP that hasn't existed.
13:21 So we did our first new IP in almost 30 years.
13:24 We started development right after "Fallout 4."
13:27 We knew we were going to redo the bulk of our technology.
13:30 It borrows so much of what we've done in previous games
13:34 from the procedural generation in games like "Daggerfall."
13:38 We redid the base engine.
13:40 That's the whole game loop.
13:42 When people talk engine, they're talking about,
13:44 what is the inner core loop of the game
13:47 and how all parts talk, not just the renderer.
13:50 Most people see engine, they think graphics renderer.
13:52 That's just one part.
13:53 So we redid the graphics renderer.
13:55 We had a whole bunch of new AI, new animation system.
13:58 We have a different system just for crowds,
14:00 new system for visual effects.
14:03 And so much of it was new.
14:05 This project obviously took us a while,
14:07 and a number of things also happened during this time.
14:09 We're jumping up in hardware
14:11 into the series X and S on Xbox.
14:15 The pandemic happens,
14:17 obviously affected everybody in the world.
14:19 And we became fully part of Xbox
14:23 as part of them now with this game.
14:25 You know, each of them on their own create a challenge.
14:27 All of those things together made this one a challenge,
14:30 but one that was really, really thrilling for all of us here.
14:34 And if you see the original pitch of "Starfield"
14:37 go back 10 years ago,
14:39 the tone, the way the game feels,
14:41 really, really sticks to it.
14:42 Hmm, look what I made here.
14:45 After "Redguard," the company changes,
14:47 and now we're part of ZeniMax.
14:49 We almost had to like reset ourselves
14:51 and who we were coming into "Morrowind,"
14:53 and then we build off that.
14:54 These share a very similar technology base
14:57 in the same way these share a technology base.
14:59 And now this does.
15:00 If we meet again, there'll be an "Elder Scrolls VI" here.
15:03 You're talking to me, but there's 450 people here,
15:07 and we still have people that work on "76"
15:09 and a team there and doing updates for these games.
15:11 We have about 250 on "Starfield."
15:13 These only exist because of all of those people
15:16 and us working together.
15:17 It's why the games are so big.
15:19 It's why there's so many moving parts
15:21 and so many interesting things that people will find
15:23 is that comes from everybody here,
15:26 and all of them putting something special
15:29 of themselves into it.
15:30 You know, seeing it visually,
15:32 even though they're obviously digital,
15:33 the boxes make it tangible.
15:35 These are these things.
15:35 They have kind of their own personalities,
15:38 and I'm going back and picturing the faces of the people here
15:42 that I've made them with.
15:44 There have been so many people
15:46 that have been on the journey with us here,
15:50 and can't wait to continue it together.
15:52 (upbeat music)
15:54 you