Biography | Todd Howard — Piccard Drive, the Rockville Door He Kept Walking Back To

Bethesda Softworks was already in Rockville when he first knocked.

The company had left the Maryland suburb it was named for in 1990 and settled among the office parks off Piccard Drive.

A press release dated 18 August 1995 lists 1370 Piccard Drive, Suite 120, as the mailing address. The same building is still published as headquarters.

Howard asked for a job on a holiday during his senior year and was told to graduate first.

He came back after William and Mary and was turned down again for lack of openings.

He took work at a smaller studio in Yorktown, Virginia, and kept approaching Bethesda at trade shows, including the Consumer Electronics Show.

In 1994 the studio hired him as a producer. He was in his early twenties.

His first credited Bethesda work was producing and designing The Terminator: Future Shock, released in 1995.

Design work on SkyNET and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall followed in 1996.

A 2005 Washington Post profile later described those early years as a basement operation where finished games were packed into boxes on site.

This pin is the public, long-published corporate address, not a private routine.

The moment is the hire that stuck after two refusals.

From this lot he would lead Redguard, then Morrowind, then the games that made the company a household name.

Photo: Todd Howard, 2010, Matt Grandstaff / Bethesda Softworks, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons