Fallout E-Book

Erwan Lafleuriel

• Herausgeber: Third Editions
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 343

Beschreibung

The year was 1997 and Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game had just been released by Interplay.

This book looks back at the entire Fallout saga, tells the story of the series' birth, retraces its history and deciphers its mechanics.

The perfect book to discover and understand the origins of Fallout, with the saga's genesis and the decryption of each of his episodes !

EXTRACT

"The intro music and the end credits were the final main components of this hybrid post-apocalyptic/50s ambiance. Initially, Brian Fargo wanted to signal Fallout’s inspiration with Warriors of the Wasteland, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but when he heard The Ink Spots, he changed his mind and loved the result. The first choice was I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire by this group of crooners from the 1930s/40s, but unfortunately the high cost made it impossible to acquire the rights. But while browsing an extensive list of tracks from the era, the team found that Maybe, by the same group, had almost the same sound-with the added bonus of being cheap! The lyrics are about a break-up, from the point of view of the person being left behind: "Maybe you’ll think of me when you are all alone/ Then maybe you’ll ask me to come back again". Leonard Boyarsky notes that, "It worked with the intro [and the ending]", referring to the ending with the betrayal and lonely exile of Fallout’s hero. "It felt like it was this genius plan we had [...] but it was only later that we decided to kick [the player] out of the Vault. I feel like this is a metaphor for the whole game: it looks like we had a better picture in mind than we did, it just came out of the things we were doing"."

Leseprobe

Fallout. A Tale of Mutation by Erwan LafleurielPublished by Third Éditions 32 rue d’Alsace-Lorraine, 31000 [email protected]

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All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the written authorization of the copyright holder.

Copying or reproducing this work by any means constitutes an infringement subject to the penalties stipulated in copyright protection law no. 57-298 of 11 March 1957.

The Third logo is a registered trademark of Third Éditions in France and in other countries.

Edited by: Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi Editorial assistants: Damien Mecheri and Clovis Salvat Texts by: Erwan Lafleuriel Chapter 6: Rémi Lopez Proofreading: Jérémy Daguisé and Zoé Sofer Layout: Delphine Ribeyre Cover: Jordan Grimmer Collector’s edition cover: Bruno Wagner Translated from French by: Paul Harrison (ITC Traductions)

This educational work is Third Éditions’ tribute to the Fallout video game series. The author presents an overview of the history of the Fallout game in this one-of-a-kind volume that lays out the inspirations, the context and the content of these titles through original analysis and discussion.

Fallout is a registered trademark of Bethesda. All rights reserved. The cover design is inspired by the Fallout games.

English edition, copyright 2018, Third Éditions All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-2-37784-032-8

Dedicated to all the players who coldly shot the vault 13 supervisor int the back-at the end of Fallout.

Foreword

BY BRIAN FARGO

When I was a kid my favorite things in the world were playing Dungeons and Dragons and watching Mad Max. How lucky was I to finally merge these two concepts into each other via Wasteland, which then went on to become Fallout. I was always fascinated with a futuristic dark ages in which man was back to living without information and so brutish that only the strong survive. I read all things post-apocalyptic and the RPG genre appealed to me in a way that others did not. A quality RPG can make the players feel a range of emotions, from guilt to evil to benevolence, these are the feelings I want to explore through gameplay. I feel honored to be associated with such an important game like Fallout, a game that fans grew up playing, learned to speak English with, and gave them an escape into another world.

Brian Fargo

BRIAN FARGO

A Californian entrepreneur born in 1962, Brian Fargo founded Interplay in 1983 and developed or produced games like The Bard’s Tale, Wasteland, Neuromancer... With a talent for spotting talent in others, he acquired major licenses for his devs like Dungeons & Dragons, creating games for them including Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment as well as Fallout 2. Nor was he afraid to stand by weirder projects, like a certain Fallout which he dredged up from the bowels of his company in 1998. He left Interplay in 2000 when it was acquired by Titus Entertainment, and founded in Exile Entertainment in 2002, which made Hunted: The Demon’s Forge and the new The Bard’s Tale. In 2012, he pulled off a Kickstarter venture for Wasteland 2, and repeated the exercise for Torment: Tides of Numenera. He is also one of the founders of the crowdfunding platform Fig, where he launched a new campaign for Wasteland 3, the studio’s next game.

Preface

“IT MUST BE 2am on this ruined road that, probably, leads to Sacramento. A few hours ago I set off from Redding, a bit further north, and I’ve probably still got a long way to go. So tell me, what am I doing here? I squint as I take in my surroundings. There’s shade off in the distance, at the foot of a rocky promontory that’s been parched since the time the last bombs fell. But first I need to decide what I should do now. I scratch my forehead, pushing the dirt there into little black, oily lumps. There’s no room for it under my nails. They’re already full. The California sun beats down on my black leather jacket as if even it was tired of the heat. I put up with it. Death by machete is kinder than dehydration if the truth be told, but I’ll survive. As long as I make a decision.

In the middle of nowhere, deep in the West Coast Wasteland, I’m faced with two groups of troublemakers. That’s a bit of an inconvenience, because out here you only need to piss off one side in a conflict to end up hog-tied and thrown into a deathclaw nest. Fortunately, these troublemakers seem to be the flea-bitten kind. To my right, a few idle traders are trying to make their way to the settlement to sell the rotten gecko skins and three rusty nuts and bolts they found in a ruin. To the left, there’s a band of hobos with nothing left to lose and who’ve reached the end of that thread of honor that stops them from lynching their neighbor just to survive. Nobody has anything to offer, but everyone wants something. Who’s right? A voice tells me I’ll have to decide. Make a choice, take action, and live with the consequences.

Enough’s enough! I turn on my heels and put distance between us, providing no words or assistance. I hear trouble behind me: shouting and striking. Not my fight: not my problem. I’ve got enough of my own. Leave me be! I’ve just had a crazy old man ask me my favorite color to get over a bridge, and I’ve had enough. This world revolts me. Bitter, sad, disgusted, and angry I may be, but I’m still alive and I intend to stay that way. There’s still a long way to Sacramento...”

Every time I think about Fallout, that’s the scene that springs to mind. It’s not even part of a quest or an important random encounter, but a run-of-the-mill random event in Fallout 2 that pops up as you explore the map. And yet, I can clearly recall this situation that branded into my memory that feeling of powerlessness that was so rare at the time. In the late 1990s, game publishers hadn’t quite reached the “You mustn’t annoy the players” phase yet, but in general game designers provided at least one right solution, a way of keeping everyone happy. Here, the Wasteland wasn’t the only thing that was desolate. Of course, I could have killed them all, because you can also play Fallout like that. However, I asked myself if “being the bad guy” would work here.

And the result was a scene from Fallout that stuck in my memory. There are more, more violent or funnier... or even both. But if you’re looking for the series’ famed maturity, it was particularly visible there. My Fallout love affair began with a photo in Joystick magazine. On the last page, if memory serves, in the section on upcoming games. I think that the picture showed a character with some kind of heavy weapon like a flamethrower facing off against a radscorpion. I remember thinking that I had to get that game. It was definitely the reason why I bought a new PC. First the demo came out. It was made using the final game but featured a brand new quest that let you quickly get your hands on a powerful array of weapons. I couldn’t tell you how many times I played it through. At the time, I thought the animations for critical hits-and the sound design that accompanied them-were particularly impressive.

Then the game came out... We all have our own Fallout stories, whether on the first installment or the fourth, or even on Fallout Tactics or New Vegas. At the time of writing, the series and its quirky post-apocalyptic world have millions of fans. The games proffer a blend of a futuristic 1950s setting and a dystopian vision of the United States that, in the 21st century, was shaped by nuclear energy and the chaotic desert of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, forged in the heat of nuclear bombs. And yet, apart from certain immutable pillars of its game world and gameplay, Fallout has itself mutated. Drastically so, even, to the extent that its horde of fans are split into two factions: those who prefer Interplay and Black Isle’s first 2D Fallout games, and those who get along fine with Fallout 3 and 4 by Bethesda. Somewhere in the middle, New Vegas is a kind of neutral zone in the middle of a cold war, populated by fans from both camps.

There are Fallout 4 encyclopedias online. Free ones, too, in wiki format, that provide the names and raisons d’être of the NPCs found in the fourth grid square to the left of the second settlement from the bottom. But that is not the purpose of this book. Instead you will be immersed in the Fallout world, seeing it brought to life despite its austere, even outright hostile appearance. Then you will see what the series means, what it wanted to tell us through its games. The concessions-the mutations it has experienced. The aim is to understand the bonds of love and hate it shares with its fans.

Some say that Fallout 4 is the worst in the series. But why, when so many players clearly love it? Others maintain that it should have stayed 2D. Does it even matter? We will look at what exactly makes a game mature, what makes a real RPG, and the themes Bethesda has chosen to explore in its games. It’s a can of worms that has plenty of fodder for a book. But before we start analyzing and pontificating, we will lay some solid foundations and get a more down-to-earth look at how the Fallout saga first started. We will look at the development of every installment. There are faces behind this game, as there are any work of art. Ideas, hard work, errors, strokes of luck, disputes...

Fallout: A Tale of Mutation invites you simply to put down your guns while it lays bare every component of the game so that you can appreciate its mechanisms and how they’ve changed, and see where they’ve gotten stuck. You’ll see that in the chaos of the Wasteland, you’re never very far from the perfect game.

ERWAN “FUMBLE” LAFLEURIEL

After spending his childhood and adolescence playing video games and role-playing games , and after a spell in a series of menial jobs as a result, Erwan Lafleuriel became a journalist for Joystick magazine in 2003, with only a little inside help. In 2007, he left print for the web and joined Mondespersistants.com, then joined the writing staff at Gameblog.fr in 2010, where he’d spend half a decade. In 2015, he helped launch IGN France as part of Webedia group, where he still works as editor in chief, hoping one day to secure the pension that will let him enjoy a retirement of endless RPG gaming, doubtless the best hobby ever invented.

Chapter 1

FALLOUT: 20 YEARS Of MUTATIONS

THE YEAR WAS 1997 and Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game had just been released by Interplay. Brian Fargo was in charge of the project, heading a dirty dozen of developers who worked in unabashed chaos. Something unique had just seen the light of day. But Fallout didn’t come out of nowhere. To understand the origins and genesis of Fallout, we need to cast our minds back more than 20 years, and put the memories of the people who were there at the time to the test. It’s not unusual for them to contradict each other-or even themselves! -in the many interviews and presentations that have touched on Fallout, and it should be noted that Fallout’s development plotted an unusual course, even by the standards of the golden age of the 1990s.

“It was basically a bunch of guys sitting around going, ‘If we could make any game, what would it be?’ We’d joke around, we laughed [...], talking about how awesome this game would be. Then we had a budget.”1

But let’s go back to Brian Fargo, the descendant of a family of bankers whose members were behind the Wells Fargo empire and American Express. While business acumen was in this Californian’s blood, he had also proved to be passionate about video games ever since high school and his first Apple II. In 1983, he founded Interplay, initially working for Activision and then Electronic Arts with Bard’s Tale (1985). While there, he worked on scenarios and level design in addition to serving as a producer. And some of this RPG’s interface ended up in Wasteland (1988, Interplay), Fallout’s famous ancestor inspired by Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). Wasteland was set in the aftermath of World War Three, when a handful of rangers roam the desert, trying to save humanity: radioactive rats, experimental weapons, murderous artificial intelligence, a cult of A-bomb fanatics, mad scientists... All of these things which would later be found in Fallout could already be seen in this RPG, but Wasteland was the inspiration for more than just Fallout’s post-apocalyptic setting. Firstly, it offered players a mature take on computer role playing games, with complicated decision-making and choices that were often less than heroic. Brian Fargo produced this unorthodox title and also created some of the game’s systems, which again laid the foundations for features that would later be found in Fallout: the use of non-combat skills to solve problems, and the chance to influence non-player characters using charisma. The innovative features and tone of Wasteland had a lasting impact on the market, and its reputation perhaps explains why Brian Fargo found it impossible to obtain the license from Electronic Arts in order to make a sequel, but we’ll come back to that later.

Brian Fargo went on to make the excellent adventure game Neuromancer (1988, Interplay), based on the cyberpunk novel of the same name by William Gibson, and the light-hearted Battle Chess (1988, Interplay) with its amazing animations that everyone wanted to show their friends. Of course, nobody really played Battle Chess for the chess: the AI just wasn’t a match for the more serious chess games available at the time, like Sargon. Brian Fargo climbed to the rank of executive producer, unearthing and bankrolling small studios like Silicon & Synapse, which would become Blizzard Entertainment. Interplay also released The Lost Vikings in 1992, and Brian Fargo didn’t just find himself behind a range of successful games, he also forged a solid experience with varied titles, under license or otherwise. He released Eric Chahi’s Another World in the USA (under the name Out of this World), for example.

In the mid-90s, he backed an off-the-wall and off the radar project that would enable him to make his dream of a sequel to Wasteland a reality. As it happened, a few staff had created the prototype for a promising RPG in their spare time, and they wanted it to have a post-apocalyptic setting. Interplay did eventually allocate them a small budget, but the company had other production priorities with real heavyweight licenses. Besides, Brian Fargo no longer owned the rights to Wasteland, which would need to be brought from Electronic Arts! Truth be told, Interplay didn’t mind if some of its staff had fun doing their own thing, but the madcap design of this game had the impertinence to shake up the company’s schedule. What was it called again? That’s it: Fallout.

FALLOUT

In 1994, Timothy Cain (his friends call him Tim) was the only member of Interplay’s staff to be working on what would become a legendary title, but one that wasn’t even one of the developer’s official projects, just his own idea that had attracted a few colleagues who were just as passionate as him. Tim was hired in 1991, following a stint as a freelancer on The Bard’s Tale. His first game at Interplay was Rags to Riches: The Financial Market Simulation, a management sim set in 1929 in which the player tries to make a fortune manipulating the stock market. “The programmer in the office next to me had done Lord of the Rings2. Even though he was an economics major and I re-read Lord of the Rings every year, we weren’t allowed to switch projects, which kind of made me angry”, Tim Cain joked in 20163. Despite his talent as a games designer, the Californian was then assigned to an extremely painstaking task: designing installation wizards for Interplay’s games. This didn’t mean working on the game itself, just the tool that would install the program in the right place on the player’s PC and make sure it ran smoothly. Even though computers at the time were less straightforward than they are now, it was hardly a rewarding task for a creative mind and, because boredom is the proverbial mother of all invention, Tim Cain designed a program that was easily adaptable, leaving him plenty of free time to code4.

Tim Cain explored the limits of the technology available, like Voxels and the new generation of 3D space processors, and ultimately developed an isometric 3D engine that hung together. And so was born the first prototype of an RPG designed to be as tactical a gaming experience as XCOM (the famous resource management and turn-based combat game that pitted players against alien invaders, released that same year) and as visually appealing as Crusader: No Remorse, a game that has now been forgotten, but which boasted hugely impressive graphics for the time. Its visual impact was enough to convince Tim Cain that his game should run in 640x480 resolution, a rarity at the time. You just have to look at a few screenshots from Crusader: No Remorse, released in 1995, to see the obvious resemblance to the backgrounds and certain characters in Fallout.

If Tim Cain’s hobby had been transformed into an official project at that time, he might have got his hands on BioWare Corp’s5 renowned Infinity Engine, designed for the upcoming Baldur’s Gate (1998), which was under development at the same time. However, Interplay’s management still didn’t really know what was going on in its own building. Tim Cain developed his own engine and didn’t organize any meetings, or report to anyone because, to put it bluntly, nobody cared about what he was doing over there. Months went by like that, and it was not until he delivered an addictive little demo that the bigwigs at Interplay assigned two new team members to the project: Jason Taylor (programmer) and Jason D. Anderson (graphic designer).

Leonard Boyarsky, who worked on Stonekeep (1995, Interplay) before becoming Fallout’s artistic director, explains that although Interplay was none the wiser, the team was somewhat bigger than it appeared on paper. Indeed, he had been playing RPGs with Tim Cain after work for quite some time, and was involved in the creation of Fallout along with an intrepid band of incorrigible geeks: “They wouldn’t give Tim any resources to make a game, so he started basically sending an email to the entire company saying ‘Hey, does anyone want to come after work, I’m getting pizzas, let’s talk about some stuff. [... ] Those five people who showed up were basically the people who kind of designed what Fallout was going to end up being. And I remember at one point when I was actually assigned [...] it was kinda weird”. Tim Cain himself was yet again surprised by how events would turn out: “At one point the executive producer got me into his office and he said: ‘I hear you’re using resources here without getting them assigned?’ and I was like, ‘No, people are working with me after hours, but they could have gone home, so you don’t get to tell them what to do here at nine o‘clock at night.’ And the guy went ‘Ok’!”6 The following year, the official team would grow to number some 15 staff, including big names like the level designer Scott Campbell, and Chris Taylor, who designed complex game systems7.

Now they just needed to make a game. But what game would it be? Fallout still wasn’t Fallout as we know it today. Far from it. The team wanted to make a fantasy title, but the market was already inundated with them. How could they stand out against Wizardry, Final Fantasy, Might and Magic, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master, and Diablo? Ideas were bouncing around, and in the most developed scenario produced in the little-too-enthusiastic brainstorming, “You started in the modern world, you were thrown back in time, you killed the monkey that would have evolved into humans, you went through space travel, you went to the future that was ruled by dinosaurs, then you’re exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back to your original timeline, that you restored to full, and came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend”8. Yes, that really was the story they had in mind until one of Tim Cain’s colleagues made them see reason. That was when the team began focusing more on a sci-fi in a similar vein to XCOM, with humanity assailed by alien invaders. Ultimately, though, the desire to make a sequel to Wasteland won out9. As Leonard Boyarsky explains10, “I knew of Wasteland, I didn’t really know much about it and I said ‘Hey, me and Jason are huge Mad Max fans [...] and the minute it was on the table, I was one hundred per cent ‘we’re making a postapocalyptic game’ And at long last the graphic designers had a concrete idea to use to come up with drawings in line with the new game.

Fallout’s general outline was beginning to take definite shape, and the idea of reliving Wasteland was perhaps what saved the game when Interplay needed to bring all of its resources to bear on the development of some huge and newly acquired licenses: Planescape and Forgotten Realms, both titles which drew on the Dungeons & Dragons universe and were far more popular. It has to be said that seen from outside, the decision to push on with development of Tim Cain’s project seems to fly in the face of logic. Even today, sci-fi can’t compete with sales of fantasy titles, especially in a market targeting young people. The promising demo developed by Tim Cain and his team, and probably the chance for Brian Fargo to see his baby get a sequel, meant that heart ruled head when it came to the financial gamble.

But then why not just make Wasteland 2? As Brian Fargo explains, there was a legitimate reason, and one that focused Tim Cain’s crazy collective: “It’s pretty well known history at this point that Fallout was born from my inability to get the rights to Wasteland to publish myself. I tried for many years to convince EA to license me the property but they had a strong stance against doing so. This pushed me into moving on and gave me the impetus to create a new Post-Apoc universe. I remember early on we sat down and identified the things that made Wasteland resonate. We knew people enjoyed the subject, the open world nature, the dark humor, the skill system and overall tone. Tim and the team ran with the idea and started on the details of what it could be11”. According to Scott Campbell, it’s possible that back then Electronic Arts harbored “a certain animosity towards Interplay since it became an independent developer”. EA-already firmly established-even used a far-from-finished project to justify its refusal to grant the license12.

But no matter because, as we know, Tim Cain’s work was far more than just a sequel, and the array of talent at Interplay was crafting a game with an extremely diverse range of influences. While everyone knew that Mad Max, being shown on loop in the team’s offices, was a major influence for Wasteland and Fallout, there were also abundant references to film, literature, and table-top RPGs. While enjoying the pizzas laid on by Tim Cain after work to whet curious appetites, discussions touched on A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, 1961), Ultima III (Origin Systems, 1983), I Am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954), Gamma World (a role-playing game launched by TSR in 1978), and the obscure Steel Dawn (Lance Hool, 1987). The subject turned to classics like Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), and La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), but also a weird, wonderful, and very recent film: The City of Lost Children (Caro & Jeunet, 1995). Other influences were added as they came up, in particular Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), or work by Geof Darrow, an American illustrator who earned his stripes on the most otherworldly projects of Moebius, Druillet, Frank Miller, and the Wachowskis. Influences which, as you can see, can be summed up as weird and wonderfully aesthetic. A whole new mindset and unusual visual universe grew from Mad Max’s initial inspiration for the game, with explosive results.

With all of that to draw on, and a spell with the whole team locked in a hotel room until they found a solution, the game finally had its story. Or at least its bare bones: the shelter, the Forced Evolutionary Virus... and after a while, the game even got a name. During development, it was known as V13 or Armageddon, but the former fell afoul of the marketing department (too obscure), and the latter was already in use on another Interplay project13. Another name would be required. Brian Fargo suggested Fallout, which remained the favorite until the game was made14, evoking images of radioactive particles carried on the wind after a nuclear war, but also the adverse results of a situation or action. Years later, and it seems like this unusually mature title for the time contributed to the game’s success in its own way. But of course, Brian Fargo doesn’t attribute the game’s success to its name alone. “A success is always the sum of the parts coming together magically to make a unique experience. It was the name, the Vault Boy, The Pip-Boy15, the voice acting, the design, the 30s music as the soundtrack for violence. It was the perfect storm of wonderful ideas. For me it was the culmination of a healthy development mindset16.” And by healthy, he means a place where you can have fun, as Tim Cain recalls: “You could go to Interplay at three in the morning, and there would be somebody there doing something. [...] Even if you felt tired you could get up from your desk and walk around. There were like board games, pen and paper RPGs, console games, and stuff always going on. And it felt very vibrant and it’d encourage you. It was like “Hey, what are you doing that’s creative? [...] And it didn’t feel like there was a lot to compete against the ideas that we had17”.

But the thing that would elevate Fallout above the numerous other games and even the variety of sci-fi novels was its explosive mix of a post-apocalyptic setting and the retro style of 1950s America. Brian Fargo thinks that it was Leonard Boyarsky who had this “flash of genius”. Back then, though, the artistic director still had some persuading to do: “When I told people about my ideas for the look of the game, they thought I was crazy. Much to Interplay’s credit however, even though they thought I was insane, no one said we couldn’t do it. So we did it. I started pitching the fifties vibe so early that there were really never any other competing art styles considered18”. Not many players noticed that this atypical artistic direction came about quite late on in the game’s development: ”There was still a lot of things in there that were built before we ever decided to have the whole fifties vibe [...] but when we decided that stuff we really started to pushing it”, he explains, citing an “organic19” evolution. While he rejects that the idea was his alone, he strove to see it applied everywhere it needed to be in the game: “I was the policeman who made sure that we hit that tone whether it was in the art or the design20”.

The Vault Boy quickly became the game’s mascot and a key visual component in the series, and helped make the fifties atmosphere. Vault Boy was designed to replace the excessive array of icons with a striking visual inspired by the board game Monopoly—another idea plucked from the mind of Leonard Boyarsky during the many long hours spent commuting to and from work. Often happy even in the direst of circumstances, Vault Boy expressed an unwavering optimism that never faltered even when faced with severed limbs or when frying under intense radiation.

Brian Fargo reveals another key aspect to this character: “The Vault Boy is another example of 50s innocence against the backdrop of a horrific reality. He trivializes the catastrophe of a nuclear war which satirizes how ridiculous our attitude about that potential scenario was21”. In that era, the United States carefully maintained a sense of optimism during the Cold War, which was dominated by fear of a Russian attack. “I thought it was interesting the government really tried to downplay how horrible the aftermath of nuclear war would be”, explains Tim Cain22. “We actually watched those videos showing kids told to just crawl under their desks so the fallout won’t hurt them23. Now we know [...] it’s going to be much, much worse than what this movie lets on”. In the mid-1990s, however, designer Scott Campbell didn’t really see Russia as posing a threat anymore. During a phone call to a fellow developer in Russia, he heard faint noises in the background, and was told it was members of the local mafia settling a score in the street. For him, Russia no longer represented an international threat, so he shifted the focus to another credible communist superpower: China24.

While the American people couldn’t really trust their government to tell the truth during those dark days, Tim Cain believes that this mistrust is still essential today. The political cynicism of Fallout had to be timeless: “We loved making social commentary in Fallout. It’s full of it. We made it quite clear that the government was lying to you. The military and corporations like Vault-Tec had seized power. These companies profit from the fear of war, and if war really broke out, they planned on profiting again. It wouldn’t hurt if the game inspired players to view their own real governments with a more critical eye25”. Black humor is found throughout the game, right through to the bitter-sweet finale, unique in its time. “The original ending for Fallout was that you came back to Vault 13, they were happy to see you, they’d throw you a party26”, Tim Cain recalls. “One day, Leonard [Boyarsky] suggested an alternative. You get back and they say: ‘You can’t come in. With everything that you’ve done outside, who knows what you’ve become’. At first Tim Cain rejected the idea, but he gradually came round to it. “And of course it’s now an iconic ending. I would never have done that on my own”, the designer admits.

The intro music and the end credits were the final main components of this hybrid post-apocalyptic/50s ambiance. Initially, Brian Fargo wanted to signal Fallout’s inspiration with Warriors of the Wasteland, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but when he heard The Ink Spots, he changed his mind and loved the result. The first choice was I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire by this group of crooners from the 1930s/40s, but unfortunately the high cost made it impossible to acquire the rights. But while browsing an extensive list of tracks from the era, the team found that Maybe, by the same group, had almost the same sound-with the added bonus of being cheap! The lyrics are about a break-up, from the point of view of the person being left behind: “Maybe you’ll think of me when you are all alone/ Then maybe you’ll ask me to come back again”. Leonard Boyarsky notes that, “It worked with the intro [and the ending]”, referring to the ending with the betrayal and lonely exile of Fallout’s hero. “It felt like it was this genius plan we had [...] but it was only later that we decided to kick [the player] out of the Vault. I feel like this is a metaphor for the whole game: it looks like we had a better picture in mind than we did, it just came out of the things we were doing27”.

As for the game system, Tim Cain based all of the gameplay on the GURPS RPG rules, which were very popular in the States at the time. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, which players could use as the rules for any scenario and story they liked. It wasn’t a particular game universe like in other, more famous role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowrun. According to Fargo, the team liked this rules system because it included mechanisms that highlighted the characters’ personalities. The ability to gain advantages by choosing disadvantages, for example, or using bonuses from the character’s past. Better yet: an official extension of GURPS specializing in post-apocalyptic worlds—christened Survivor28—was then in production, and could bring some useful rules to Fallout. In any case, it was the game of choice for Tim Cain and his team. To make this personal preference an in-game reality once Fallout was made official at Interplay, and to be able to feature its logo on the box, they needed to buy user rights. However, the company had its sights set on other titles. “Our producers wanted to buy Earthdawn29”, recalls the designer30, who told them to get GURPS, which they didn’t know, instead. So Interplay entered negotiations with Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games), the creator of GURPS whose main interest was the prospective financial gain (according to Scott Campbell31). He also, so it would seem, loved the range of violence that could be wreaked in Fallout: “The more, the better”, he reportedly stated while visiting Interplay. Soon thereafter, he posted on his website that the team’s work “was worth keeping”, but that it wasn’t the designers who would make the decision. Management took over, but the noises seemed positive.

And yet, Fallout’s designers would have to abandon GURPS later in the game’s development, because Steve Jackson, ironically, didn’t approve of the violence in the game’s intro. Nor, according to Tim Cain32, did he like the Vault Boy character. In any case that’s the way it’s usually told. According to a post by Steve Jackson on his website, in February 1997, he found out that Interplay was dropping his license in the press a few months before the game was released. After receiving conflicting answers, someone at the developer confirmed the news, but the message still seemed positive. But in 1997, the latest message was crystal clear: GURPS was dropped, with the stated reason being that too much had already been done to modify the system to be able to roll it back.

We’ll never know what really happened, with the official story citing the usual excuse of “creative differences.” Whatever the reason, and whether the violence issue was true or simply a pretext, it wasn’t open to negotiation. And that is doubtless why Interplay decided to take the matter in hand quickly and burn all bridges, rather than taking time to find common ground. As Brian Fargo recalls, “I knew this would be a major problem for our vision of the Fallout world. We gravitate towards more mature and edgy content and I wasn’t going to compromise on that. The team was fine with the decision since we can typically move faster and be more creative without a licensor making creative demands. Clearly it was the right decision33”.

Like the adult language, violence was an integral part of Fallout. When the time came to properly explain just what the game was and what it was about (so that it could be officially approved and the sales team knew how to market it), the “ultra-violence” was one of the main draws described in the vision statement written for the occasion by Chris Taylor34. Graphic, grotesque violence designed to shock: “You can shoot everything in this game: people, animals, buildings and walls. You can make ‘called shots’ on people, so you can aim for their eyes or their groin. [...] When people die, they don’t just die-they get cut in half, they melt into a pile of goo, explode like a blood sausage, and so on-depending on the weapon you use. When I use my rocket launcher on some poor defenseless townsperson, he’ll know (and his neighbors will be cleaning up the blood for weeks!). This is the wasteland. Life is cheap and violence is all that there is. We are going to grab the player’s guts and remind him of this35”. The ultra-violence portrayed by Leonard Boyarsky was one of the more subtle questionable changes from Fallout to Fallout 4, as we will discover later in the book. “I don’t know why we loved graphic violence so much, other than that we thought it was hilarious, but it was in the game’s blood from the very start”, says the artistic director36.

In any case, Fallout was now without a game system and faced the very real risk of being canceled and dropped. Fortunately, Tim Cain designed his baby like a universal installation program, with a lot of flexibility in mind. The GURPS “module” could be removed easily without the rest falling to pieces37. However, they did need to find a new set of RPG rules for Fallout, program them, and get them up and running. And so it was that Tim Cain and Christopher Taylor came up with SPECIAL38 (for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck), with turn-based combat and skills. It took them two weeks to create this solution, and Tim would later say: “I’m not exactly sure how we did it. My memories of that period are very vague39”. In truth, it appeared very similar to GURPS, so much so that you might ask if they weren’t risking a lawsuit. Brian Fargo reassures us that “[Tim Cain and Chris Taylor] were very familiar with the different games systems out there and I had faith that they would not do anything to infringe. Action points and character attributes are a pretty generic thing when it comes to RPGs40”. The die was cast and Steve Jackson, the man behind the GURPS RPG system was never mentioned again, nor would GURPS ever be adapted to video game.

With or without GURPS, one of the main advantages of Tim Cain’s game design was that it provided the content developers with a variety of tools that enabled the player’s actions to be permanently recorded and used to trigger various events and special dialog options. As Tim Cain41 recounts, “There are three things that got it started: I let you look at any quest in the game and see what state it was in. I let you look at all the NPCs and what their reactions to you was. And I gave you a bunch of blank global verbals that you can store whatever in”. This meant that the people writing the quests, dialogs, and levels, could themselves create an array of variables to tailor the player’s experience depending on their earlier actions. Tim Cain laughs as he remembers how, “...they just went crazy! [...] It got very complex, but everybody was managing that complexity very well”, while Leonard Boyarsky recalls how, “We didn’t realize what a huge undertaking it was going to be. But we didn’t care; we worked on the game we wanted to make 42”.

When development was nearing its end, and at Brian Fargo’s request, the game designers added the Perks system to enhance the player’s gains when they leveled up. This is a noteworthy detail when you know how important this idea from Chris Taylor would become: in Fallout 4, Perks encompassed skills too, and SPECIAL also underwent a number of changes, as we will see later.

So with the release date fast approaching, a team of 30 was hard at work on Fallout and problems were popping up everywhere. A rather reserved figure by the name of Feargus Urquhart played a role in managing them, although the public would be unaware of his importance until he had been involved in many more big RPGs. Brian Fargo jokes that, “At Interplay we used to joke that we would take new producers and throw them into the deep end of the pool and then toss them bricks. Feargus was a trial by fire guy and he survived and became an astute manager of human behavior and game philosophy. There are often invisible forces behind the scenes that keep everyone focused, motivated and sane and Feargus is one of those guys43”.

In the end, Fallout had two close calls when it was nearly dropped by Interplay: first when Tim Cain’s team was supposed to be transferred to work on the juicy and newly acquired Forgotten Realms and Planescape (D&D) licenses, and again when the GURPS license was withdrawn. Fallout had to resist the influence of Blizzard’s Diablo, which made every developer in the world’s heart start racing: RPGs had