>In the darkest of moments, when it seemed the writing was on the wall for Bethesda, project leader Todd Howard took the team to a nearby hotel for a private meeting. There, Howard rallied the developers’ spirits, handed out personalized business cards, and assured them it would all work out, as long as they were willing to keep going.
>That speech, one source says, probably saved the company.
Based fucking Todd. Fuck all doubters and haters. He will rise again in these darkest moments just like before.
>handed out personalized business cards what a faggot
Levi Rodriguez
>People were worried about their jobs, too. “We were worried it was all gonna go down before, but now the game’s not coming out on time. Are we gonna lose our jobs?” So I did an exercise where I asked everybody, “If you could have any title in life, what would it be?” It was just like an email question. “What would you like to be known as?” And you get all sorts of great and random answers. But my plan all along was: I printed business cards with that as their title, and I called an off-site meeting. I did the meeting in another building, so I think a lot of people thought they were fired, or being laid off.
>And I brought everybody in, and said, “Here’s where we’re at: We’ve been given a lot of pressure. People outside the team have told us what to do to get this done. But the only way this game actually gets done the way we want is if we all come together and do what we think is right. The team has been through a lot. If you’re on board, and we are gonna reset and do this thing, then come up here and take your cards and join me tomorrow.” And that was the meeting.
About Redguard: >We’re all talking about tech we didn’t have, and we pitched this idea to Todd at the time, and he’s like, “You know what? I like pirates. And everybody knows this game Daggerfall. So let’s just make a pirate game in Daggerfall.” And we’re like, “Fuck yeah.” Because the [project that would become Morrowind] was just getting on its feet.
Or is he the king of liars and the great deceiver?
Camden Young
About The First Pocket Guide to the Empire: >The way Todd and I bonded was doing this kind of fake in-world stuff in the manual, and we wanted to do something like that for Redguard. Eventually, when the game came out, it would come out in the manual. And that’s when we realized we knew fuck-all about the world; there was nothing except Daggerfall, which is very small. There maybe was a timeline stuck somewhere, with just a bunch of names and stuff like that. And so much of it was kind of just coming out of a D&D game that the original [Bethesda] guys had done, and most of those guys were gone. So we started obsessing about the world or whatnot. For some reason, you can’t make a pirate game without deciding how the universe got created.
About making Morrowind weird: >The game was originally set in the Summerset Isles. And then we got bored and decided, “Man, this is really boring. How about we put it in a volcano with like giant bugs everywhere?” And people were like, “What?” So Todd Howard — the easiest way to get anything past Todd, at that time, was you basically just had to say “Star Wars.” Which was true for me and anybody then. So I was like, “The game should be like Dark Crystal meets Star Wars.” And he was immediately hooked.
Todd going balls to the wall: >But it was a bad time; Bethesda was about to go under. And that’s when ZeniMax Media got formed. I met with the key people — and they didn’t really know me then — to say: “What do you want to do?” For me, it was kind of a no-fear moment. “Well, it can’t get any worse, right? We’re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.”
