It seems like Todd Howard, executive producer and longtime developer at Bethesda, has a lot of admiration for Neil Druckmann, the head of Naughty Dog. According to a former dev from both studios, Howard was very inquisitive about Druckmann during their time at the home of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.
Heather Cerlan, an artist who worked at Naughty Dog for a number of years before spending some time at Bethesda, speaks with Kiwi Talkz about socializing with Howard. "Me, my art director, our senior producer, and Todd, all went out to lunch after I'd been there for a week," she says.
"[Todd] actually was asking me a lot of questions about what it was like to work with Neil," she reveals. "I got the sense he either idolized Neil, or wanted to understand his process."
She says "it took her by surprise," because it "felt like he was a bit of a fanboy on Neil Druckmann, which was interesting." Indeed it is, Howard's an industry legend who's shipped several of the biggest games ever, and it's odd to think of him looking up to anyone, but then he didn't make Uncharted or The Last of Us, and if anyone will understand the kind of graft it takes for those kinds of productions to land, it's him.
Cerlan was at Bethesda from April 2018 through to April 2021, working on Starfield, following a tenure contributing to The Last of Us and a couple of Uncharted games at Naughty Dog. She muses about whether a little rivalry was going on over the Fallout and The Last of Us TV adaptations, though she's unsure where either side was up to for those while she was at Bethesda. "I think there was a little bit of competition, I don't know," she adds.
Adaptations for both properties were stop-start for much of the 2010s, probably feeding a little competitive spirit over which would get cameras rolling first. They were greenlit around the same time: The Last of Us was announced in March 2020, and Fallout the following July, but it'd take the latter an extra year to reach screens.
Either way, I hope Druckmann and Howard have since managed to have dinner together. It sounds like it's something Todd's wanted for quite some time.
