Todd Howard

The technology for radiant stories in 'Skyrim' is phenomenal. We tried and pared it back.

I think streaming technology is definitely coming, and it's gonna make people's access to games infinitely easier. You've seen it happen to music and movies, and I think it's a great thing.

I see games... as the ultimate combination of art and technology.

Every year, there's a new idea we can't do and a new technology for something that excites us.

When you start over and jump into new tech, you don't know what the negatives are going to be until you go through a few cycles. We're always changing our tech, but we don't wholly destroy it with each game. We're taking parts out.

You never know how your work is going to be received, and to have it be not just received by the people who wanted it or knew about it or our traditional fan base, which is pretty big, but also having it spill over to everybody who plays games, and then those people telling everybody else who doesn't play games - that's what it became.

Despite all of our games, all of our success together - 'Elder Scrolls,' when we started, it was a very generic fantasy. It had its parts. We pushed it to have more of its own unique identify. We're proud of the work everyone did there.

The way we built 'Future Shock,' you have a height map and instanced 3-D objects rendering on top - that, believe it or not, is still how we build today. It's our basic paradigm for how to build a space.

With 'Fallout 4,' we've done over 20 million downloads, and most of that is mods. That's a staggering number. It has always done well on the PC - but the console audience has such a hunger for it because they've waited so long. We think there's a really good future there, with both 'Skyrim' and 'Fallout 4,' that we hope to continue to add to.

Ashley Cheng, who I've worked with for 20 years, he's the studio head in Rockville now. He manages more of the day-to-day stuff. I can focus creatively on what we're doing now and what we should be doing in the future.

If you look at previous generations, even where they didn't open up power, you look at an early Xbox 360 or early PlayStation 3 games and compare those to the ones that came at the end. The developers are just getting better. So time is far more important than opening up a little bit here or there, though it does all help.

Eventually, there will come a day where I'm not making games at Bethesda. Hopefully that's a long time away. But I want to make sure that who we are, what the worlds are, what the company is, that's sustainable far beyond me.