Todd Howard Quotes

Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game.

Just make games for yourself and try to have a critical eye to what you do. If you genuinely like the game, there will be other people who like it as well.

I'm a game designer, so I care about the whole experience.

There are major benefits to building a game once and improving it over a long period of time based on user feedback and behavior. It's kind of depressing to have to build a game once, take all the user feedback, and then spend the next 3 years building another game.

Every time I make a new game, I put all of my effort completely into that game. It's like putting all your effort into a new child that's being born. Once the project is done, I can step back and look at it objectively, which is when I can see a lot of flaws. That's when I start to make a new game that tries to fix some of those flaws.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don't. We ask what is working and what isn't. So it's not as if I'm shutting out input.

A very important part of game development is testing - something that a lot of developers don't do.

Roblox is all about having great user-created content. It really ups the bar in the quality of the game.

We do think deeply about the sequencing of our games, but having said that, Nintendo is well-known that if a game isn't ready, we will push out the development in order to make sure that it is as strong as possible when the game launches.

Ours is a company that doesn't do annualized software, and so when we create a 'Zelda' game, when we create a 'Smash Bros.' game, or a 'Pokemon' experience comes on the platform, it needs to be exceptionally compelling because we plan on selling it for a very long time.

If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.

Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

Game design is a funny thing. There are people out there who are really good at it, but it's not clear that they can teach it. It's a very intuitive process. It's an art.

I think whenever you have a product you are always trying to improve it. Whether it is a commercial project out on the market or it's a creative collaboration, you are always looking to keep you audiences more engaged.

I talk periodically with the producers at EA and I try to be as honest as possible because as great as EA does, you just don't want to hear good things. These people are really passionate about making games and making them as realistic as possible.

I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.

As a game creator, I'm not 100% satisfied when looking back at the previous game that I released.

I'm a hardcore gamer and would never let you down by designing a crappy title.

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.

Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.

Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.

I'm a designer, and for me, things are always evolving, and such evolution is necessary.