Todd Howard, the director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, spoke to IGN at the premiere of Amazon’s Fallout streaming series in Los Angeles, where he said not to expect for any other Bethesda games to receive a similar treatment.
Howard said that an adaptation of Fallout had been pitched to him for years ahead of Amazon’s attempt, but he had always shot them down until it felt like one had the potential to be good.
“This is something that I said no to for like, a decade,” Howard said. “Everyone wanted to make a [Fallout] TV show or a movie, and I was like, ‘nah.’ I wasn’t really feeling it.”
He said that he had a similar sentiment about other games from Bethesda’s catalogue, which includes games like Starfield and the Elder Scrolls series with its major hit Skyrim.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing in the works,” Howard said when asked about the possibility of other games receiving adaptations. “Everybody asks, like, about Elder Scrolls, and I keep saying no also. And I would approach those – I’ll probably say no.”
Howard said that he did not want an adaptation of something to be made just for the sake of making it, but wanted one to be born out of a creative desire to make something that works as a show on its own.
“You never know if someone’s gonna click,” he said. “But I think this really came out of, ‘we think things are aligning to do a high-quality job.’ It wasn’t forced. It was kind of a natural relationship and ‘hey, this sounds really cool.’ As opposed to, ‘we should have a show,’ right? It never came from that.”
Though he said the possibility is unlikely and there are no projects currently in any stage of development, he left the door open for this to change with the right creative partners.
“I can’t predict the future, but this has been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever done, and we’re just kind of over the moon, everybody in the studio with seeing it this way,” Howard said.