Ask the creative catalyst behind sprawling, bestselling games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 about his breakthrough moment, and he'll tell you a story about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
That was Bethesda Softworks' first stab at handcrafting a hyper-detailed fantasy world, as opposed to the procedurally generated lands of previous games in the role-playing series. Morrowind won dozens of awards and shattered Bethesda sales records, but more than half of those plaudits almost never happened: When Microsoft approached Todd Howard about putting Morrowind on its Xbox console, he balked.
"I was like 'Ehhh, we’ll see,'" Howard says, "'but I don’t think the game’s going to work, because I'm not sure the console audience wants what we do.'"
When Microsoft announced the Xbox in March 2000, Morrowind was in the middle of development. The Elder Scrolls games had until then been PC-only affairs, following the wisdom of the time that deep role-playing experiences happened in cloistered home offices, computing tabernacles with click-clacked keyboards and mice, and not casually tapped out on gamepads in living rooms.
Fortunately for Bethesda, it did risk an Xbox version, which launched one month after the PC game in June 2002. Then, the thing no one expected to happen happened: Morrowind went on to become one of the console's best-selling games, right up there with Madden NFL and Grand Theft Auto. The previous game had "sold fine," according to Howard, but Bethesda was on the verge of shuttering. Morrowind's millions of sales—the majority of them on Xbox, not PC—might have saved it.
