Bethesda Softworks Inside the Vault Q&A

Another new Inside the Vault developer profile features Bethesda senior designer Kurt Kuhlmann.
What other games have you worked on?

I started at Bethesda way back in . 1996 (wow, time flies). I was the most junior designer imaginable, coming in at the end of the Daggerfall death march. An interesting introduction to the game business, to say the least. I did the initial design for Morrowind, when it was originally going to be the immediate sequel to Daggerfall. Then when that project got shelved, I was one of the designers on Redguard. That's still my favorite project, probably because it was much more of (my baby) than any other game I've worked on it originated in brainstorming sessions between Todd Howard, Michael Kirkbride and myself. Many a Fuddrucker's burger were consumed while we worked on Redguard. Those were also the days when we were so small that I ended up building several levels in 3D Studio Max, writing dialogue, designing puzzles, scripting a nice bit of everything, which is still what I prefer when I can get it.

After Redguard I left Bethesda for a while and worked at a company in Colorado called VR-1 than nobody's ever heard of, because almost nothing we did ever saw the light of day. Then in 2003 Todd lured me back to Bethesda to work on Oblivion. For Oblivion, I was primarily responsible for the main quest. I was also the lead designer on Knights of the Nine.

Sort of to the side of all this, I've published two wargames (you know, the kind with a paper map and cardboard counters), one self-published and the other through a wargame publisher.