As an executive at Bethesda Game Studios, one of the most well-known video game developers around, Todd Howard is a high profile person in the games industry. To fans of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (which Howard directed), the developer is heralded as some sort of development genius. This is especially the case as the game continues to release on more and more platforms with Skyrim most recently coming to the Nintendo Switch. But recently, fans of the developer have been showing their appreciation in an unusual way.

Previously, Bethesda fans went to town on Todd Howard's Wikipedia page, "trolling" the developer by changing various information about him on the listing and this led to the page being locked until today, April 25, 2018. A Tumblr post highlighting this date went viral and received over 150,000 notes as many fans had noted the date down with an aim of editing the page once the restriction was up. Although Wikipedia mods were mostly prepared for this, and locked down the page on April 24, fans have still made their way through.

http://lesbianrey.tumblr.com/post/164298174870/hey-siri-add-to-calendar-vandalize-todd-howards

For example, in Russia, Howard's page was not locked, allowing a fan to change his name to read Todd Coward and Hodd Toward. They also changed the main image to a distorted photo of the developer and said that he is currently employed at Todd Game Studios, rather than at Skyrim developer Bethesda. The Elder Scrolls series' Wikipedia page wasn't locked either and so some fans edited its development history to include Before Todd, Hodd Toward, Rodd Toward, Godd Howard and Bobb Toward, and other nonsense eras in the series' timeline. Other Wikipedia pages, such as Todd Howard's page on The Official Bethesda Softworks Wikia page have been edited in a similar fashion.

http://sciencebees.tumblr.com/post/173284119389/sciencebees-so-i-went-to-check-and-see-if-todd

http://rockboci.tumblr.com/post/173288716378

The trolling of Todd Howard will come as little surprise to anyone who is part of a video game community online. Players are fans of game directors and development teams as much as they are the games that they make. For example, one fan made Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan into an actual character. "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team," a phrase said regularly by Kaplan during the game's developer update videos, is also a meme among Overwatch fans.

Generally, players' enthusiasm for games and their development teams is positive or silly, like in the case of the Todd Howard Wikipedia edits, and they are generally harmless. Fans are unlikely to let up when it comes to the trolling and things may only increase when the Bethesda E3 2018 event begins, so let's hope that the Wikipedia mods are fully prepared.