‘To say, I saved the world – that’s the magic of games’: Bethesda’s Todd Howard

With a background including Elder Scrolls, Fallout and forthcoming epic Starfield, how does the acclaimed developer see games in the next five years?

When you’ve got a discography like Todd Howard’s, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on.

“Terminator: Future Shock,” he says. “When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you’re doing a post-apocalyptic open world! In 3D! But we already did that in Terminator. It’s an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace.”

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