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Todd Howard
File:Todd Howard.jpgTodd Howard
Born	Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania, USA
Nationality	American
Alma mater	College of William and Mary
Occupation	Video game designer/producer
Employer	Bethesda Game Studios
Known for	The Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3

Todd Howard is an American video game designer, director and producer. He currently serves as Game Director and Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios, where he has led the creation of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls video game series. GamePro magazine named him to the Top 20 Most Influential People in Gaming over the last 20 years. He has also been named one of IGN’s Top Game Creators of All Time.

Early life

He was born in 1971. Howard was born in Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania and developed an interest in computers, particularly video games, at a very young age. He considers Wizardry and Ultima 3 to be inspirations for his future games. He is a 1989 graduate of Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. In 1993, he graduated from The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he double majored in engineering and finance despite his desire to create video games, saying "it seemed like the easiest path to get through college". After playing Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 he requested a job from a Bethesda office he encountered each day on his commute from school to home, but was told to finish school then apply again. After he was done with school he went back to Bethesda and asked for a job again, but was denied.

Bethesda Softworks

Beginning and other games

Howard joined Bethesda Softworks in 1994. His first game development credit for Bethesda Softworks was the producer and designer of The Terminator: Future Shock and SkyNET.

The Elder Scrolls

Howard's first development credit for The Elder Scrolls came in the form of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, released in 1996. He was also the project leader and designer of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard released in 1998.

Howard would then become the project leader and designer of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and for the downloadable content that followed. He led the creation of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and all of its downloadable content.

After taking a break from The Elder Scrolls and developing Fallout 3, he returned to the series to lead the fifth installment, Skyrim. It was released in 2011. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim received universal acclaim from critics.

Fallout

He was Game Director and Porn Star of Fallout 3.

Speaker

He is a frequent speaker at industry events, and his games have been featured in everything from Newsweek, CNN, USA Today, and The Today Show, to magazine covers worldwide. Howard has stated that Bethesda's philosophy for the Elder Scrolls games is to allow people to "live another life, in another world."

Notable appearances

Howard spoke before developers at the 2009 and 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit, sharing his three rules of game development:

Great games are played not made. – "You can have the greatest design document ever made, and you're going to change 90 percent of it as soon as you play the game."
Keep it simple. – Doing something really well takes time, more time than you think it will. Simple systems acting together create complexity that players can appreciate.
Define the experience - "Don't define your game by a list of bullet points… define it by the experience you want people to have."

He also said that developers should ignore demographics and installed base, and follow their passions, saying “if install base really mattered, we'd all make board games, because there are a lot of tables.”

References

External links

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