Todd Howard "hadn't had a break in 20 years" when Fallout 4 came out, so he took a 3-month sabbatical to "go touch some grass"

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"You get to a point in life where you spend more time in the fantasy world than with real people"

Todd Howard
(Image credit: Bethesda)

Todd Howard has led development of some of the biggest and best RPGs ever made, and it's no secret that the game industry can exact a toll on developers. But everybody needs to "touch grass" now and then, and that's why Howard finally took a break that had been decades overdue after the launch of Fallout 4.

Making RPGs like Oblivion and Skyrim means developers spend "years and years of your lives together – it's a bonding experience," as Howard tells GQ. "But I had been going really hard for a long time. I took a sabbatical after Fallout 4 for like three months. I hadn't had a break in 20 years."

Titles like Fallout 76 (an online game) and Starfield (a brand-new IP) presented new challenges for Bethesda, but the "routine" of making Fallout 4 wasn't exactly a cakewalk. "If routine is working like mad dogs all the time, because we really did," Howard says. "It becomes a bit of an obsession. You get to a point in life where you spend more time in the fantasy world than with real people. So you’re like, 'Maybe I should go touch some grass.'"

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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