The Story of Skyrim Part One: Todd Howard and the Road to Oblivion

Happy Skyrim Day! In celebration of the release of Skyrim on VR and Switch and toaster and whatever else, here's the story of how the game's director, Todd Howard, got the job of working at Bethesda!

The story behind Skyrim is big and complicated, and it didn't seem like it would fit comfortably into a single video, so instead, we've focused for Part One on the growth of the Elder Scrolls series. Part Two will talk more about the art and design of Skyrim itself, and we'll post a link here once it's ready (subscribe and join the Notification Squad to get to see it first).

This week has been ridiculously busy for us, with BretonStripes working away from home for three days, meaning we only had two days to throw this together. That being the case, Kotor asked Twitter what video we should make, and naturally, you guys picked the most time-consuming video, so it's been a fun couple of days for us. If there are errors in this video, they're brought about by lack of time, and if BretonStripes sounds a little hoarse, it's because she's been delivering trainings all week and doesn't have much voice left.

Also, hey, thanks for reading this far down! You might have noticed that our last two videos have done appallingly badly stats-wise. Apparently YouTube has decided to hate on us even more than usual, and only around 10-20% of you got the chance to see that our videos about Star Fox and the SNES Mini are up. We worked hard on them, and the SNES review features a cool real-life book prop, so go check them out!

The Story of Star Fox:    • Star Fox: The Story of Jez San and the Arg...  

How it Feels to Play the SNES Mini as a Family:    • How it Feels to Play the SNES Classic Mini...  

If you want to be really awesome, please hit the notification bell to make sure that our future videos maybe do a little better. We're really hoping that this downward trend isn't permanent.

Alternatively, follow us on Twitter to get more solid announcements when videos are up.

The majority of the research for this video came from interviews with Todd Howard himself, who, despite being a "controversial" figure in the games industry (as is literally anyone who's popular enough to be recognizable), actually seems pretty relatable. He's just a big old nerd, who loves video games. Can't hate on him for that!

Here are some links to those interviews:
   • How Skyrim's Director Todd Howard Got Into...  
   • Bethesda's Todd Howard on the Evolution of...  
www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_83/471-Bethesda-The-Right-Direction

Special thanks to Aaron Herbst for the music for this video, it's awesome. Check out his YouTube channel:    / @aaronherbst  

Anyway, hope you guys have a great day! Please share this video widely to help us grow, if someone can share it on Reddit (perhaps r/Skyrim) we'd appreciate it - Kotor is getting self-conscious about doing too much self-promotion on there.

Thanks! You guys are awesome!
Very tired BretonStripes (  / bretonstriped  ) and super sleepy Kotor (  / kotorcomics  )

Patreon:   / videogamestorytime