Bethesda development chief Todd Howard has officially ruled out appearing on the Fallout TV show even in cameo form, insisting he’s better behind the camera than in front of it.
Ever since the Fallout TV series was announced, fans of the Fallout video games have wondered whether Howard might appear as, for example, a random Vault dweller, a ghoul, or some other background character.
But Howard failed to appear in Season 1. So what about Season 2? In a recent interview with Howard and Kevin Beatty, Head of Product for Samsung Gaming, Interactive Experiences, and Emerging Tech (Bethesda and Xbox recently announced a partnership with Amazon and Samsung to stream Season 1 for free on Samsung TV Plus), we asked the Bethesda boss if he’ll appear in the Fallout show at any point in the future.
The answer was a clear no.
“They’ve offered me a whole bunch, even in Season 1. I was going to be in the sort of Dr. Strangelove Vault-Tec room, where they’re talking all the experiments, and some other things. I think I’m best behind the camera.”
That’s a reference to the scene in Fallout Season 1 set in the Vault-Tec boardroom. It’s a key flashback in Episode 8 that showed Vault-Tec executives, including Barb Howard, conspiring with other corporate heads to divide up the vault experiments. Incidentally, this is also the scene in which the executives agree to stage the Great War to ensure societal control and study human behavior in confined, often cruel, experiments, setting the stage for the post-apocalyptic setting fans know and love.
So Howard doesn’t even want to show up as someone The Ghoul takes out?
“I said no to all of them so far,” he replied.
That’s good restraint, we pointed out. “I don’t want to distract. Everyone goes, ‘oh, there’s Todd!’”
Then, when we asked Howard if he didn’t fancy being the Stan Lee of Bethesda and showing up in everything, he replied: “Not at this time.”
That’s that then — no Todd Howard in Fallout. But we do know a lot about what to expect from Fallout Season 2. The new season picks up in the aftermath of Season 1’s finale and travels through the wasteland of the Mojave to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas. The eight-episode season will premiere on December 17, with one episode rolling out weekly until the season finale on February 4, 2026. Fans of Obsidian’s much-loved video game will be interested to hear that Season 2 takes a “fog of war” approach to how it juggles Fallout: New Vegas’ various endings.
Meanwhile, in the same interview with IGN, Howard said Fallout is the franchise “that we’re doing the most in right now,” and was coy when asked about the potential return to New Vegas or a Fallout 3 Remaster while fans wait for Fallout 5.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
