Bethesda Softworks - Todd Howard Interview

Polygon interviewed Todd Howard who has been inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame recently:

Tomorrow night, Bethesda's Todd Howard will be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. It's a fitting honor for a developer who has steered two of the most esteemed game series, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

His most recent work — Skyrim (2011) and Fallout 4 (2015) — are highly regarded role-playing explorations of a fantasy world of dragons, and a post-apocalyptic zone of decay and dastardly conspiracies. Both were critical and commercial successes.

Skyrim particularly seemed to catch its moment. While RPGs were once a niche entertainment for relatively small numbers of adherents, Bethesda's dragon-slaying magical exploration game punched through to the mainstream media, and meme status.

He says the game's high profile success caught him by surprise. "I don't know how it happened," he says. “We could feel it when it crossed over to being referenced on television or other places. It's nothing we could ever plan for. It just kind of happened.

"Certain things came together. People's mood, timing, vibe, marketing, all of it. But it happened very quickly, almost as soon as the game was out."

Howard believes the elevated status of RPGs is due to the fact that so many games now borrow some of that genre's fundamentals such as NPC interactions, exploration, character upgrades and strong story. But the big breakthrough comes from freedom of movement.

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Thanks Farflame!