“Truthfully, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine. And that shouldn't be a surprise to you.”
Firezide Chat is a bi-weekly newsletter where you get to know the people behind your favourite video games 🎮.
Every other week you get access to a new short-form video interview with an interesting person from the games industry, hosted by games journalist Kirk McKeand. Every episode delivers life advice, a surprise , and hopefully a good laugh.
Welcome to our second episode. And if you haven’t subscribed already, please do, so you don’t miss next interview.
Pete Hines
Pete Hines was head of publishing at Bethesda for 24 years before finally calling it quits post Microsoft acquisition. In our latest Firezide Chat, we discuss Pete’s time at the company, all the highs and lows, the Skyrims and the Microsofts, and everything that happened in-between.
“Truthfully, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine. And that shouldn't be a surprise to you.”
We also get an insight into the real Pete Hines, the boy who always felt “like the runt of the litter” and the man who cried when he was finally discharged after a long hospital stint. From his first tentative searches on the internet to his time on the stage at E3, it’s time to meet Pete Hines.
.
OCCUPATION: Former Bethesda marketing lead, now retired.
AGE: 56
BACKGROUND: Worked as a part-time video games journalist while working at the American College of Cardiology.
“Bad things happen when you are somewhere you're not supposed to be or doing something you're not supposed to be doing.”
Kirk McKeand: What was your route into the games industry like – can you tell us about that journey?
Pete Hines: Sure. So my route into the industry started when the internet was becoming a thing, because I am old enough to remember when that happened. And so in the mid ‘90s, I was working at the American College of Cardiology in Bethesda, Maryland, and learned that a computer down in the library had access to something on the internet. Where you could go and look up things.
And so I went down there, and the first thing that I looked up was X-Com, to see if there was a sequel. I love the first one. I'm a big fan of Julian Gollop as a designer, and I thought that game was fantastic, and I, desperately, was hoping there was a sequel.
I poked around on the internet and eventually came across a few gaming sites. For those of you who have been around long enough or remember, Happy Puppy used to be where you could go and get demos and some news, and I found a site called The Adrenaline Vault that was hiring writers.
“Hiring” is a little bit of a stretch, because there was no money involved. In the beginning, we were just doing it for free with, you know, the idea that eventually we might start getting paid, which we did. I did that for probably four years or so on the side, while I had a full-time job and was going to MBA school, and then one day, was talking to Bethesda.
I wasn't really happy where I was and what I was doing. I had a conversation with Bethesda, and they said, ‘Hey, why don't you combine your multiple jobs into one and come run marketing and comms for us?’ And I jumped at that chance. I started at Bethesda in October of 99 and was there ‘till I retired.
In the early days you were writing game manuals and stuff as well, weren't you?
I mean, in the early days, Bethesda was the most mom and pop operation around. We had a basement where, after the devs were done making the game, they would go down into the basement to help with assembly of the product.
So when the CDs came back from replication, we're not even the DVDs yet. We're still on CDs. When the CDs came back from replication, they're dropping CDs into cardboard trays with, you know, a warranty card and a manual or whatever, and boxing and shrink wrapping. It was a small operation.
When I joined in ‘99 Zenimax had just bought Bethesda earlier that year, and basically was attempting to bring them out of the mom and pop era. But in those early days, my first six years at Bethesda, I was kind of the whole department.
I had an admin assistant for some of that, and I had a marketing artist. PR, community, events, marketing, advertising, I did all of it. And so, working on Morrowind and Todd Howard said, “I don't have a manual. I've asked people to try and write my manual. They suck at it. I need you to write the manual.” I don't know how to write a manual. He's like, “You'll do great. Here's what I need.” And I was like, all right. I know how to write. I wrote the manual, and I was the editor-in-chief of the strategy guide for Morrowind as well.
So my marketing artist and I put that entire thing together, did the layouts, editing. It was crazy, but it was back in an era where Bethesda was all hands on deck. There are like 40 of us in this company.
There's no room for looking around like, who's going to do this? And truthfully, Bethesda, in my entire time there, never lost that attitude and spirit, which was part of what made that place special, which was just, yeah, I'll do anything. I'll wrap keyboards or roll up posters – none of us are above anything.
Like, this place works because everybody puts a hand in to help out. And I don't care where your job title is, what you're responsible for. This has got to get done. I'm here, you're here. We're gonna get this done.
Writing the strategy guide, you must have put some hours into Morrowind then?
Oh yeah. I didn't write the strategy guide. That was Peter Olson, who wrote both the Morrowind and Oblivion strategy guides.
We give him a build of the game and the construction set, and he would do all this writing, but the game is changing while he's writing all this. So then it comes in, and I have to work with the designers, like, “Oh, that quest moved and that one doesn't even exist anymore.”
We actually have to make this accurate to the thing that is constantly changing and evolving. But yeah, it was part and parcel of why, I think, personally, I was good at my job – I did know our games. I played them all, I understood why they were fun.
I understood why they were annoying. I understood where their problems were. I didn't want to go into talking about a game that I didn't understand myself, and you can never – especially with Bethesda Game Studios games – fool yourself into thinking, like, “Oh, I've seen everything.” I talked to people on the team all the time who don't know everything that's in the game. Todd didn't know that was in there and he's a designer.
I also started to appreciate game development from the eyes of developers. Yeah, you don't see the whole thing all the time. You're focused on: this is my level to build, or my city to design, or the quest that I'm working on. But I wanted to make sure that I was at least on par with any game dev in terms of understanding what our game did or didn't do. I can't talk about or promote something that I don't really understand. So obviously, I got really invested in what we made.
Obviously, there's some negative aspects of merging with another company, but there must have been some cool stuff as well, right? Like, was there a moment where you were growing, where you were like, “Holy shit, we're here now?” Is there a moment that stands out for you?
I think the Holy Shit moment was actually Skyrim. Morrowind allowed us to stay in business, like it was a really big hit, but it was a really big hit at a moment that, truth be told, we were in some trouble. We really needed a hit.
You can ship all the drag racing and bowling games you want, but that just wasn't going to keep the lights on forever. And so Morrowind bought us a grace period. Then Oblivion, you know, and again. Credit to Todd Howard, who said, “I am not just going to turn around and spit out another one of these in two years and put it out on the same console.” He saw an opportunity that the next thing was going to go really big, and he really wanted to embrace that. We could be a poster child for what next gen graphics look.
If you remember going from Xbox to Xbox 360 and that jump to high def and what that was like in that moment. Like, is that a real forest, or is that in the game? And that legitimized us. We were the consensus game of the year off of Oblivion.
At that point we've got one big hit, right? Morrowind wasn't some runaway success that, you know, everybody talked about. So Oblivion was like, we're meant to be here. We are good enough to do this. It doesn't matter how big we are, how big our competition is. We can do this. And we carried that belief into Skyrim.
Fallout 3 did a lot for us, but there's also people who love that game and people who never played it, but that wasn't a thing with Skyrim. Everybody played Skyrim – that was the thing that made us feel like we've arrived, we are legit. You have to be concerned about us if you think you're going to win game of the year. You have to take us seriously now. We have broken out role playing games into a whole huge group of people who have never played an RPG before, but played Skyrim because it just looked like fun.
The follow up to that was doing Fallout 4 and that was the first time I said, “Let's stop doing a booth at E3 and do this showcase thing.” Because I think we've earned that right now to say we're going to take an hour and tell the whole world what we're up to.
What was it like on a personal level? Like going from, you know, folding T-shirts in a back room to presenting at E3? Was it nervewracking, or did you just find it natural?
Well, first of all, I was doing both of those things consistently. Here's the other thing, though, right? Everything I just talked about was Bethesda Game Studios, right? Bethesda published everything Bethesda Game Studios did, and a bunch of other stuff, not all of which was beloved. I worked on Rogue Warrior. I worked on a lot of stuff that did not sell and wasn't beloved. And so when it came to like, how did that feel?
Dude, I don't know. When Skyrim was done, I didn't get to go, “Our next game from our studio isn't for a couple of years.” I got a thing to ship in three months. It never stopped for me. And so it's really easy as the publisher to stay humble, because everything we make isn't going to be a success. And as soon as we fuck up, they're going to be waiting to tell us about it. So it was really easy for me to be like, we have to keep grinding and pushing. Because, what good does it do for me to go, like, “Ah, we made it, phew?” Now we’ve got to defend it.
It gets harder, not easier. Like, now we've established a standard. We have to exceed this every time. We can't just hit it and go, this is as good as the last one. Like, I'm not coming into work to do shit that's just as good as last time. If it's not going to be better, what are we doing? Bethesda Game Studios, their headspace was different because they did go from Skyrim to Fallout 4, but I didn't. I had a lot of other steps in there that included Brink and a bunch of other stuff that was not beloved and did not win awards. Those are my babies too. I worked on them. I gave myself to them, and when they don't do well, yeah, you feel humble, man.
I still think Brink was just ahead of its time, honestly. If that had come out five years later, people would have loved it.
Maybe, maybe. I mean, honestly, it's pretty high up on my list of, like, disappointments in terms of what that game could have been, how good the marketing was for that game. I really love the marketing for Brink and then the game…
And honestly, I love the concept of the game. I mean, you probably noticed, it's not an accident that that game went free on Steam a couple of times in the intervening years. Like, that was tough. That was Todd Vaughn and me. I still love that game.
Like, it's still good. What if we put it out again? Like, how many people would play it? Is there ever a point? The free thing is, if we get enough people to play it, would we consider putting more dev time in it to address stuff? We just never got to a point of pulling resources away from new shit to go back to something that we didn't get right. We could just waste millions of dollars in time and get nothing.
You touched on it a little bit, but can you tell me what you're doing now? You said you're giving your time to people.
Yeah, I've been retired for a couple of years now. And you know, even before I retired, I had sort of set my heart towards what my retirement was going to look like. And, you know, my roles and responsibilities at Bethesda changed a lot over the time. Obviously towards the end, I'm not writing manuals. I mean, there are none, but if there were, I'm probably not writing them. I'm probably not editing the strategy guide.
I was doing a lot of high level strategy, managing teams and that, mentoring and advising and helping people think through problems. And just like I tried to be a guy at Bethesda that people felt like they could come to with problems, whether you worked in my area or not. I just tried to offer myself up as somebody that was willing to listen and hear what was going on.
And so doing that without the need for anybody to pay me has been awesome. I mentor and advise a few former Bethesda folks that either got laid off or left and have started new things. I love the folks from my old company. I still do some of it with other folks in the industry. I'm on a couple of boards.
But like, I'm, how do I put this? I'm really intentional about not limiting myself. So I do a lot of stuff. I live 15 minutes from my alma mater, Wake Forest University. I do a ton of stuff on campus. I'm the lead supporter for men's soccer. I do some mentoring with those kids and advising while they're here, once they leave.
Kirk, when I left college, and when I was struggling my way through my early years at Bethesda, or just my career, I could have used somebody to talk to who had been where I had been, or was trying to do what I was trying to do, just for feedback. I didn't have that, but I would love to be that person for somebody else.
And it turns out there's a lot of people who could use somebody like that. And it brings me a tremendous amount of joy to just do that. Like, there's no money involved, there's no contracts, there's no paper. If you need to talk, let's talk. I had one right before our call with a guy overseas. And it is just awesome to see how our conversations help them in their own careers as they're trying to figure out things.
And hell, half the time all I do is like, well, I've been there before. And like, here's some things that we did to try and solve that, or make it better, or whatever. And like, sometimes it's just like, yeah, I've had problems. Don't have the same ones I had. Go find new problems and new issues. Don't bang your head against the same shit I banged my head against, you know what I mean?
So I do that everywhere I can find it. High school kids, college kids, executives, people running companies. I don't really care. I just like showing up for folks.
As someone who gives a lot of advice, you must have heard some good advice over the years. What's the best bit of life advice that you've heard?
I will go with one that I used the other day with somebody. It's a piece of advice my father gave me, which is long ago, back when I was in high school, but it proved very true and relevant, and I have passed it along to any number of people.
And it's as simple as this: bad things happen when you are somewhere you're not supposed to be or doing something you're not supposed to be doing. That's it.
And I have watched that happen and show up so many times that like, I accepted it as a truth. It is just a straight up truth, and I have used it, especially in younger life, to move away from situations that had the ability to put me in a bad spot, or to have something bad happen.
But you know, it is as a Boy Scout. I grew up in Boy Scouts, right? Scouts honour and, you know, be trustworthy and clean and reverent. Dude, just try and be a good person. Don't put yourself in bad spots. Don't hang out with people who aren't good for you.
That's a bit like: believe people when they tell you who they are, right?
Like yeah, and learn from your mistakes as well. Kind of into one. Absolutely true.
What about bad habits? Do you have any? I mean, you're 55 now. You still got bad habits? You trying to break any?
Yeah, cursing. That's one. Working at a video game company. I honed and refined my profanity on football fields, soccer fields. So I am no amateur. I am a trained professional, but I also swear too much.
And since I left Bethesda, I do it less. Not a lot less, but less.
Once I retired my doctor said, “Hey, those ADD meds you're on are sending your blood pressure through the roof. You should probably think about stopping that unless you really need it.”
And I was like, well, I'm not working anymore. Like, I don't need to be super focused and dialed in every single day.
So the thing that I'm working on right now. I have a pretty bad ADD brain, and now that it's completely untethered, I am learning how to wrangle my brain and get it to focus on things. It's part of the reason why I do what I do, which is like yeah, having an hour for a bunch of individuals here and there actually fits my brain pretty well, as opposed to sitting down and doing this for eight hours. I don't have that ability right now, but I also don't have anything in my life that requires me to sit down and work for eight hours.
I don't just want to mentor and I don't just want to goof off and play golf or go watch soccer games. So I'm two years in, but I'm still learning to find balance in my retirement.
But I will also tell you I'm having a shitload of fun while I'm doing it, because what I thought would work for me is totally working for me. It brings me joy to see, to help other people, to see them just appreciate having a conversation or whatever.
So I'm very pleased that this actually worked, because I wasn't really sure if it was gonna.
There's a lot of us with ADD in the games industry, isn't there? I don't know why.
My brain is just constantly spinning and looking for something to lock in on. And like, well, it turns out video games are pretty good at that. That like you can lock in and then like, oh, like I'm able to keep my focus on this game.
What I'm doing, I play a ton of stuff on Steam Deck now. I barely used my Steam Deck when I worked at Bethesda, but man, I use that thing so much.
And I play almost exclusively indie stuff now, but I find it does a really good job of allowing me to focus, allows me to relax, and you know, little sense of immersion.
I’m a huge card game guy. Like you can't see, but right over there is an uncut sheet of Magic: The Gathering and an uncut sheet from Elder Scrolls: Legends.
All of those cabinets behind me, Kirk, those are all sports cards. That entire thing that is my US Soccer collection, my Arsenal collection, my Wake Forest collection. I'm a big card nerd in general.
What's the best game you've played in the last 10 years?
How about this? How about since I retired? I've only finished one game since I retired, and that was Indiana Jones, which took me way longer to play and finish than it should have.
But that was a great game. That's the first game from Bethesda I ever had to play not as part of Bethesda. And that was way harder on me than I thought it would be. I created the teaser trailer for that game way back in the day.
And so to work on it at that end and then have to step away from it and see how it came out at the end. It was just weird. I mean that's the only game I've finished since I retired. Everything else has been.
That's because you play games that don't end like Slay the Spire.
Well here's the other thing, which is, and this actually goes back to because I have bad ADD that I am not treating. Doing one thing is really hard for me.
So I love like, oh I got my Steam Deck and I'm playing and I got a movie on in the background. Or I've got the UCL matches on in the background. Or just like my brain gets to do more than one thing than sit in front of a TV and play Indiana Jones and it's not doing something else.
And that's a big reason why I like being able to Steam Deck and find other stuff to do, because I find it easier to concentrate and focus.
The stuff that I'm playing, a lot of it is turn based, so it's really easy to get lost in the movie for 10 minutes and my character didn't die on the screen because I just spaced out because I love this scene in Bullet Train or whatever I'm watching.
But yeah, kudos to indie devs on Steam Deck, because you guys are crushing it.
Does your brain allow you to read books?
Yeah.
What have you been reading lately?
Um, I'm making my way through the Reacher series, which I had never read before.
Did you say the Witcher or Reacher?
Reacher.
I had already read The Witcher. This is the Jack Reacher series, because until the Alan Richman Amazon show. I never really got with the Tom Cruise movies.
You're like “I don't know what this is.” And then you read the book and you're like, oh this character is fucking amazing.
And then you see how Alan portrayed him and like, oh that's Reacher. And so I was like, shit, I gotta read these books.
I am enjoying all of them. But I have a whole pile of stuff over there. I got a World War One thing over there I gotta read. I got a bunch of stuff. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow is over there. One of my former colleagues told me I need to read that.
Like I said: ADD, dude, I'm all over the place. I do this today and not tomorrow and whatever.
I'm retired. Nobody's keeping track of all this shit. I'm just making sure I'm finding enough meaning and purpose in my life to be happy and give back and enjoy myself.
Since you're retired, we'll direct this question at your job at Bethesda. What was the best thing about your job there? The people? Anyone specifically you want to shout?
I got to work with Todd Howard for 24 years, who is amazing. I got to see up close game creators. But that's not why I love Todd Howard. I love Todd Howard because of the person he is and the relationship that we got to have over 24 years.
Or, you know, I said I worked for basically six years by myself before I got help. The first person I ever hired to come and help me do what I was doing, marketing PR community, was Erin Losi, who is still there, who took over my role as head of Global Mark Comms when I left.
I miss that lady every day. She's like a little sister to me. We spent every day, you know, eight hours plus a day. Shit, we wish we were only working eight hours a day when we first started.
But she and I have an awesome relationship, and I try to give her space because I was still her old boss, and I'm trying not to hover over her. But I don't get to see her every day.
That was the thing that hit me hardest when I retired. It was not like, “Oh, I don't get to work on Elder Scrolls 6.” There's always going to be an Elder Scrolls I'm not working on. I can't be here forever. But not getting to see the people. Because again, keep in mind, every single person that worked in marketing comms at Bethesda when I left, I had hired, because there was nobody there when I got there.
And so to bring all of those people in and to get them to buy into how I think we should do things, in the way I want to market, and how we talk about games and how we work with each other and how we organize ourselves. They all bought into that.
And it was really hard to walk away from them and not get to see them on a regular basis.
At the same time, I also hit a point of realizing I could not spend the rest of my life doing something that wasn't for me. It was for everybody else, which is what I was doing.
I was staying there because this place still needs me. I just hit a point of yes, it needs me, and I am powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly, to protect these people, to maintain what we worked so hard to create, which is an incredibly efficient, well run video game developer and publisher.
And when I was unable to do what I thought my job should involve in continuing to have that place be, you know, if not the most efficient publisher in the game industry, it was way the fuck up there. And when I couldn't protect it, and I saw how it was getting damaged and broken apart and frankly mistreated, abused, whatever word you want to use, I said I am not going to sit here and watch this happen right in front of me.
I think I've done everything I can do. This is not when I wanted it to end or how I wanted it to end, but that's not really up to me. And at a certain point, truthfully, my mental health was so deplorable that I just said I cannot.
I mean I gave two weeks' notice. I was waiting until after Starfield. I knew I was leaving the year before. Every time Todd delayed Starfield, I thought, fuck, I'm here another eight months. And Todd was the only one who knew. It's another reason I love that man. He showed up for me when I was just at my wit's end and got me through that, and got me out of there in a way that I still retained my sanity.
I was going to ask you what the worst thing about your job was, but I think you just covered that.
That was the worst part. Yeah, that was the worst fucking part.
It was to join a place that I genuinely was a fan of and people there I genuinely held in high regard and esteem, and then to get there and see how it actually worked.
To talk is something, right? But I'm very much about what is the follow up to that? Do you mean what you say? Or are you just saying shit that sounds good and then as soon as you leave this room that's completely forgotten?
Because that is not how we ever operated at Bethesda.
And that's not to say everything we said, we did. Yeah, we probably didn't fucking come close to that, but that was absolutely our intention. We are going to do what we say and say what we do and be genuine and be authentic.
And truthfully, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine. And that shouldn't be a surprise to you.
You had some normal jobs before that, right? What was the worst job you've ever had?
I think objectively the worst one was probably the real estate maintenance job I did for two summers in Charlotte, which basically was some combination of commercial properties.
Like, oh, you have to go mop the floors and scrub the toilets in the bathrooms and stuff, go cut the grass and pull weeds.
But it was also, you know, if you've ever driven anywhere and seen several acres of land that's completely overgrown with weeds and trees, and then if you've ever gone back by there and all that shit has been magically cut down, that was what I did.
They would drop me off and go, here's 10 acres. Here's a sickle and a jug of water, and we'll be back at five o'clock. Just clear all this, as much of this shit out as you can.
It's 100 degrees out. There's poison ivy everywhere. Enjoy your $8 an hour or whatever the hell I was making.
That sounds shit.
Yeah, but here's the thing though, Kirk. I did some shit work growing up. I worked third shift at a Kodak plant in Charlotte, North Carolina over a Christmas break, working from 11pm to 7am.
And if you even remember cameras with film, do you remember they used to have those little canisters that you have to pop open and the film is inside?
My dad had a dark room in the house.
There you go. Perfect, so you know exactly what I'm talking about.
So my job from 11pm to 7am for two weeks was to show up at the plant and there's a conveyor belt that's going to come in with all of those film packets that people would send out to get film developed.
You open the packet, you pull out the canister, you pop it open, you take the film out, put the film back in the bag, throw the canisters in the trash, and do the next one for eight fucking hours, 11 to seven in the morning.
It was the worst.
But I got an appreciation for shit work. People aren't lining up around the block for the third shift at the Kodak plant, but it gave me an appreciation for good old fashioned manual labor.
Working at a warehouse, working real estate maintenance, working at a Kodak plant. I worked at a pet store.
My first job out of college was working at a Catholic high school. They offered me 15 grand a year for that job to be their director of development admissions.
I think I talked them up to like 17 grand, right? Whoo, flush with cash.
So I took a second job working at a pet store down the street nights and weekends just to make enough money, like bagging up fish and vacuuming out shit from the gravel and doing all that.
From my 20s to my 30s, I never had less than like two or three jobs at a time. I think my record was like seven. I was an athletic trainer and an assistant soccer coach, and I did development and admissions. I just did everything. I just worked and hustled and tried to make my way.
And being able to do all that, bringing that work ethic to Bethesda was huge for me. It was formative.
It's going to take a lot of work. Yes, you have to be creative and you have to be talented. You have to have good ideas and you have to have good execution. But above all, you have to be able to work past your point of exhaustion, past the point at which it's no longer fun.
Nobody fucking asked whether it's fun. It's got to get done. We got to ship this game. We got to run those ads. It's work.
It's the strategy guide, right? I'm at the office until three and four in the morning every single night for weeks getting that strategy guide done. Nobody told me. Nobody said you have to be here, you have to get that done.
I know what I am responsible for. I know what has to get done. And there's nobody else to give this to. There's nobody else in this company that I can pull on that I'm not already pulling on.
And it's just going to be how hard are we willing to work for, how long to get this done.
I think everyone should have a taste of hard, horrible jobs.
Totally agree. Work retail, manual labor, have a bit of everything.
I was a plasterer labourer for a bit. That was awful. I worked in a flower factory cutting stems of flowers.
I used to have the big post hole place for signs in people's parking lots, like a post hole digger, and you're going through fucking asphalt.
Have you ever tried to do that? That will make you question your sanity and it'll give you every opportunity to quit. Do you want to go back and tell your boss yeah, I failed, I couldn't do it? I'm just going to keep at it till I get this fucking done.
And yeah, to your point, Kirk, there is value in like hey, before you go sit at a cushy desktop, you should appreciate the work that you don't have to do.
That's a privilege. That you don't have to sweat your ass off outside in 100 degree heat or fuck with poison ivy or work third shift at a Kodak plant.
You're lucky to be here. You should appreciate it.
And truthfully, this goes back to the Bethesda thing. You can't be above anything.
Like, oh, I'm not going to roll up posters.
Well I am, and I'm your boss, so you don't really have a leg to stand on if I'm on the ground rolling up posters to hand them out.
Everybody else is like well shit, if Pete's doing it I'm going to have to do it.
Yeah you are, but that's how I get to set a culture of we're all going to do everything it takes to make this work.
And you're not just going to look around for oh we need to move this table, let's find somebody to move this table.
No. You grab that and I grab this end and let's take it to where it needs to be.
Then it's done. It's moved.
Who do you admire most in the games business for their work ethic?
I mean, truthfully there isn’t a developer that I got to work with that I don’t respect for their work ethic and how committed to their craft they are, and all of them are really different from each other, right?
MachineGames versus Arkane Lyon versus id versus, you know, ZeniMax Online or Bethesda Game Studios. Every one of them has their own version of it, but the effort that they put in, the work that they are willing to do.
You know, those guys – Marty and Hugo at id, I don’t think those two ever fucking sleep. I really don’t. Those guys work endlessly, constantly. They are obsessed with their own success, with their IP, with their teams. And there’s just no limit to how much or how hard those folks will work to bring to light the thing that they want to do.
I mean, I’m biased, he’s one of my best friends, but there’s nobody better than Todd Howard, and not just when it comes to creativity, but how hard that guy works and is willing to work and to set a standard.
Really hard work that results in shit output is a waste of time, right? We’re not just working hard so we can say we worked hard. It has to be good and quality and usable, and not shit we got to throw out and do all over again.
Did he start as a programmer, Todd?
Todd’s first job was converting Arena from floppy disk to CD-ROM. That was his very first project at Bethesda. Todd has a finance degree. It’s not like he went to school programming video games. No, no. He had a finance degree.
But what made him amazing, Kirk – and by the way I use this a lot in my mentoring when I talk to folks, when I go talk to schools and people ask how do I get a job in the game industry – I say, what are you doing right now?
Because when Todd Howard was that young, yes he had a degree in finance, but do you know what he spent all his free time doing? Making games, learning how they got made, working on making his own shit.
He worked on a sports card software organizer thing at one point. But he didn’t do finance and just sit on his ass. He had a passion and he lived that all the time on his own.
That is what made him a great game designer. He didn’t say, oh I’m going to wait until I get to college and get into a game design university or get a game design degree.
No, no, no. He started where he was every fucking day and built that passion and built those skills to do what he could do.
He is not the best programmer in the world. He might not be the best designer in the world. But there is nobody that is better at all of that shit than Todd, in my opinion.
He understands how all of that shit fits together and impacts each other in a way I just haven’t quite seen the same anywhere else in the industry, internal or external.
And such complex games as well, because they’re not straightforward games that they make.
Look around the industry. Who else? This is one of the things that used to frustrate me the most doing marketing and PR for Bethesda.
If you’re going to hold us accountable for stuff, please do it in the context of what they’re doing.
Who else out in the world allows you to just stack up one quest after another on the fly while you’re going wherever you want and doing whatever you want? Go try that shit in Red Dead Redemption 2.
All the NPC routines and stuff as well. Pick up the quest and—
Then try and stop doing that quest and do something else and see what the game does.
What does the game do? It says, no fucking way. Pick one of these. We’re not keeping track of all this shit at the same time.
And it’s like, hey, put some respect on the name of not just Todd but this whole team that leans into the shit everybody else runs away from.
We don’t have one quest at a time. We got checkpoints and save points and blah blah blah. They say we don’t fucking care. Go wherever you want. Try and break the game. We created it for you to do that.
And you’re probably at some point going to be able to break it because there’s so much chaos in here.
But the game experience you get for that is something you can’t find anywhere else. Nobody gives you that level of freedom.
Nobody says walk into this room full of weapons and cast a spell or launch a grenade and watch all the shit fly around the room. They don’t do that.
It’s funny, because I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric on the internet about how the Creation Engine is outdated and all this stuff. No, that engine’s built to build that specific type of game. That’s why they made that and that’s why they use that engine. It’s not there by accident.
It’s why Todd Howard says – and I think possibly rightly so – that the most important thing he’s ever created is not actually Oblivion or Skyrim or Fallout 4. It’s the Creation Engine. It’s the Creation Kit.
To recognise if we don’t have a tool that allows us to build and manage and organise the world like this, we’re never going to do it. And then to go further and say what if I gave this exact same tool to our community and said here’s the tool the devs use to make the game. Go do whatever you want. Change whatever you want.
That was a major discovery, a huge moment for that studio.
That’s why people still play Skyrim, right? Because of all the mods. It gives it longevity.
I mean people are still playing Morrowind. Holy shit, that game’s been out how long now?
Yeah, I remember being a little kid and getting it from the shop.
But it goes back to your point. Whether it’s Elder Scrolls or Fallout, recognising the need for a tool that would allow you to create and organise all of that chaos and still allow all that freedom – and then giving that tool to fans and saying do whatever you want, change whatever you can, undo our stuff or add your own stuff, we don’t care.
That’s really powerful. It created a different community around Bethesda Game Studios than I think you ever get if they do it another way.
Yeah, I agree. Now you’ve retired, what time do you get up in the morning?
Whenever I want.
I still wake up pretty early, like between seven and eight, but it kind of depends. Believe it or not there are a lot of mornings where I have to set an alarm.
I like going to see my Wake Forest men’s team practice. Campus is right there. They practice early, so I set an alarm to get out there by eight to go see my guys.
But look, Kirk, you’re asking the wrong question. The question is not what time do I have to wake up. The question is how many days do you get to take an awesome afternoon nap? And that number is almost at 100%.
I fucking love a good afternoon nap. So I don’t mind waking up early because I know at two o’clock I’m going to go take a nap and wake up and I still got the rest of the day.
Do you stay up late in retirement?
No, not really. Eleven is my absolute latest. Usually by ten I’m starting to fade unless there’s a sporting event I’m staying up to watch.
What do you dislike most about yourself?
What do I dislike most about myself? That’s a long list. Which one do I pick? There’s a lot of stuff about myself that I don’t like.
Actually one of the things I’m working on in retirement is giving myself more grace. I have always had this internal talk track where I just kick the shit out of myself every time I see I do something dumb or make a mistake.
I’m just really hard on myself. Fortunately I try not to let that bleed over onto other folks.
But that is probably the one thing I’m trying to work on the most: to stop killing myself and beating myself up for doing stupid shit.
Everyone does stupid shit.
Yeah, I feel like I break the average on that one. We can debate it. But I am trying to do better about not being so negative towards myself when I watch myself do something dumb or make a mistake.
One thing that helps me though is realising that people don’t think about you as much as you think about you.
For sure.
You might think they’re laughing at you or whatever but they probably don’t even give a shit. If you could go back in time to a historically important period, where would you go?
I don’t know. That’s a good one. I’m not sure I have a good answer. I have kind of an answer but it’s not a very good one.
If I could go anywhere – and this is going to sound weird – I would love to go to Pointe du Hoc on D-Day.
I grew up a massive World War II buff. I was born in 1969, so the biggest war this planet has ever known ended like two decades before I was born.
There were a lot of people around who were in that war, so I became really interested in what the hell this was and the scope of it. Then I got really fascinated with what these young men went through.
How the hell did they survive the horrors of war and what they managed to accomplish?
This greatest generation, as it’s been called – and it’s hard to argue against that.
I became really fascinated with the heroism and sacrifice of everyday, ordinary men who were shoved into a situation that was not of their choosing, but their willingness to fight for the man next to them, defend their country, and defeat forces of evil.
I’ve always found that to be incredible stories of heroism.
So if I could go see something like that – I mean it would probably be pretty horrifying as well— – but I’ve been to those cliffs and looked down them. Just trying to picture how these guys, under fire and bombs and grenades, are climbing up this cliff. It’s just amazing to me.
What about if you could go back and change something about your life?
Truthfully, if I could, I would go back and find… I’ve thought about this.
One of the things I’ve been doing recently is going back to my old high school. They’re doing some stuff and I’m one of the chairmen for a capital campaign they’re doing.
I went back to talk there, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my life in high school.
I grew up like the runt of the litter. In the States when you’re in grade school and it’s picture day they line everybody up shortest to tallest. The only reason I wasn’t the first kid in that line was a young lady named Maria Alvarez. She was the only person who kept me from being the shortest person in that class.
It’s already humiliating to be the shortest boy. It’s girl, me, then like eight girls, then one other boy and eight more.
I was just a shrimp.
Part of me says I’d like to go back and put my arm around that kid and say hey, this is all going to work out. This fucking sucks right now.
But at the same time I’m keenly aware of the impact of getting my ass kicked by bullies and being the smallest guy. That helped form who I am now. I don’t want to skip over any of that.
I’m not tripping over myself to thank my bullies like hey thanks for all those wedgies that made me a success at Bethesda.
But yeah, I don’t know if there’s anything I’d change.
Is that why you like Todd Howard so much? Because he’s short?
No, I don’t like him because he’s short. But I totally get how tall Todd is because that’s how tall I felt growing up.
That’s why I played soccer, which in the ‘70s and ‘80s was not a popular sport in this country.
Half of my ass kickings were because I played soccer. “The big baby plays soccer.”
But I loved it.
That was my oasis as a kid. I was really fast and I had the ball and I didn’t care how big you were. You weren’t going to lay a hand on me before I put the ball in the back of the net.
Basketball? You just shove me out of the way.
Baseball? I’m this tall, my strike zone is two inches wide.
So I liked having that oasis as a small person. And when I finally grew up a little bit I never lost my love for it.
When was the last time you cried?
I don’t want to make it seem like it’s been forever. I’m an emotional guy. I probably cried at a Kodak commercial last night. It’s not like I never cry. I cry all the time. But the last time I memorably teared up was after I had a really bad foot accident not long after I retired.
It took six surgeries and 13 months and five days to recover from it.
When I finally got to ring the bell when they release you from their care, like okay it’s healed, you’re good – I definitely got emotional. It was like holy shit, this is finally over.
That was a really long, lonely, difficult period.
How long were you in there for?
Thirteen months and five days of surgeries. It wasn’t all in the hospital, but it was really bad. Todd Howard saw the photo. I warned him not to look.
My wife has a picture of my foot in the ambulance and Todd said it looks like you were attacked by somebody wielding an axe.
I tried to talk him out of it. I said dude, that will live rent free in your head. And I’m here to tell you that photo still lives rent free in my friend’s head.
How do you want to be remembered when you die?
Honestly, if I can be remembered as somebody who was kind and funny and liked to help, and left people and places better than he found them, I can live with that.
And what would you have on your tombstone?
Maybe we just put that: left people better than you found them.
Follow us on TikTok and Instagram
https://www.tiktok.com/@firezidegaming
https://www.instagram.com/firezidegaming
If you have feedback on how we can improve, just hit reply or email us at [email protected]. We read everything.
Firezide Chat is produced by Smartfeed Studios and published in collaboration with Challengermode. It is our belief that a well-crafted set of seemingly simple questions can reveal more about a person’s inner life than a conventional interview. Every episode delivers life advice, a surprise, and hopefully a good laugh
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up now to get Fireside Chat in your in inbox.
Upgrade and get access to the long video version of the interview.
Become a paying subscriber to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. (Including 100% more minutes together with Pete Hines.)
Upgrade