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vaultt-tec · 8 years ago

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How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

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glopratchet · 5 years ago

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You can't see anything on it, but you guess that it's probably a little more advanced than what your computer was capable of back in grade school What we have is a screen of buttons and a list of plot lines and a bunch or characters who are either important to the story or just there for you to kill You're not really sure how much you want to play with this thing though since all of these games seem pretty cut and dry, like they're going to be exactly the same no matter which one you choose Throw it up there let us see it Plot -Bunny's right, it's better if you choose since A: You're the mastermind behind all this and B: You'll enjoy it more that way Press the button with a flourish, we have work to do Plot-Bunny's right, Unseen story Try to incorpate in to mechanics but descriptions are nice too You can pay others to use their creations, or even make your own a separate items with a single coin ; (much smaller than the gold coins) A "Creations for Coin" topic will be started, but it is not necessary to use it First impression of character -creation What can you character do with what abilities they have? 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Delivering lore is about consistent details Collecting 5 of the same rune creates a stack of that rune that some may argue that you don't need in a game, but you'll need them to understand your bios - From backstory to in-game details Everyone starts with 3 Inventory Slots, each lasting 3 Posts ; (Coins are included in this), get more by investing in "Backpack Creation" Head cannon ideas can range from silly to creative Bad ones get deleted, good ones' get used (Starting Gold: Briar ; (Thyme? A dash of herbs and a sprig of flowers Power: Healing Touch ; (3 Use) - Sacrifice Thyme's herbs and flowers for Health Packs Ability1: Harmful Smell ; (1 Use) - Release a scentless gas that knock's enemies back and confuses them momentarily So do you control a character or do you watch a character Tell me about it: Why are you resigned to telling a story instead of playing one? Why would someone willingly do this to themselves? You could watch the character manage the story or manage it for them, makes no difference to me Rejoice! To become a Narration Pixie! For that is what you are now (Also who reads this stuff? ) Your Friends, your Classmates, your Family ; (Surly they're reading this) nobody will ever look at you the same way again ; (Except for Sophie who just asks "What now? Don't believe me? Move from hex to hex and let the story unfold from there, don't just watch some scrub do it for you Also there isn't just survival on the line ; (Although there is that), but your grade in my class, of course Then the ui is like dashboard for witnessing plots / ui plot select Select a plot to start the game To skip the prologue and go to credits, choose 1 To jump into the action, choose 2 For more info about each section and the credits, choose 3 There's not much but A, and C so that narrows it down at least How do you interact with the plot By lightly to heavily imagining what the plot is and actually feeling the emotions, this plays out like a choose your own adventure This gives you shares in game, but losses shares for your choosing Make all the choices and you have nothing to represent the fact that you ever existed The 1% of people who finish get 1% shared in being a winner Are you roman During the market stampede? By creating alligator snapping turltes and dropping them down into the world they slowly grow over time, eventually turning into a deadly underwaterbeast that can crush and burn anything your grade in my class, The events tab would write out stories In the past you thumbed through them like a college radio enthusiast, but with this set of incomprehensible inputs you decide that it might be better if you personally arranged them about the nonplayer characters and their life events--what they felt, saw, thought, and how they were died You didn't read too much into it then, but maybe somebody was trying to tell you something Rant: Ultimately written with NaNoRe write your user story So what you are creating is one giant story that quite frankly nobody will ever read mainly because they aren't instructed too Also many sections are so long that nobody, even you have the persistence to read it all through But that doesn't matter, in fact you probably don't even care if anybody reads it But how is interactive when you enter text it plays out in real time based on how you set up the characters and events Your main character is a veteran that served 20 years? Have him reminiscence about the past, but don't go overboard Got a bully? change what they say based on your input Have mother nature herself be a female Goddess of destruction? Have mechanics come up that support the theory after you get passed the religious fanaticism of it all I mean little bubbles could pop up that tell you that the plot as been advanced to a new page It needs tweaking so that's going to take time So what do you do until then? Bold: The unending sun accosts your skin with only the mercy of lukewarm breezes to cool you down "Not bad, not bad, A full head of gray hair onto your Violet scalp thanks to your orc heritage, dark circles surround your eyes and a white beard reflects how many worries have plagued you in the past few days Perhaps even re watch the drama unfold on the hex map You killed forty of the young men in the ensuing battle and now have them at your beck and call to take out to the battlegrounds as you decide on what to do with your Nation, So your resourceful half-dragon master makes first contact with a nearby orc village--it went better than anyone could have anticipated That would fade into video during certain segments that really need a high definiton render His elaborate map shows what could only be the western front of an on going war It's quite frankly more high tech than anything he's shown you before You peer closer at the twenty foot hexagonal tiled ground and watch as the war drones fly overhead and bombard a nearby rocky outcrop They cut through it like butter, then continue on The why from his perfect memory and ingenious implementation You fondle your many options You see a screen of all the characters names and on the row exists options that can be choosen for them to say or do when 'active Something about alligator snapping turtles dropping from the sky (he said dropping not falling Well that's interesting) Must be an event He had many connections to companies out side of the village so that might be lucrative Someone is spying on the village, via a drone maybe? You can try and track it down and disable it Or leave it alone thinking nobody noticed Nah He had only four re-inforcements waiting to aid him in his journey as commander of the war-band Or are you the turtle roaming about The screen pulls back and now you are shown to have your pointer finger on a yellow giant star at the center Also other planets exist out side of your vision Maybe the moon of this planet contains resources You can only control events that YOU personally have been a part of If someone else where to take command no doubt you would be demoted Where did he come from? Why is he here? Could he have destroyed the village in the first place? But if it lands in certain places it opens up new characters for you to play The universal storyteller could have ideas for you for a price presumably The thing is all of this story is really happening in the background or to make your own Hitting select pulls up a prompt to continue the story Turning the three terminal into one large hexagon would allow you to use it as a visual mapping tech for re-creations of battles or wildlife etc Combining functions eh? Removing enemies from the story could increase the rate of survival for people such as your character There is a fourth column that exists with the why, how and what columns In the simulation this displayed 'life' and was at 100% Pressing it changes the column heading to a screen ending of continue or create The hallway now exists with walls on each side displaying blue swirly patterns that seem to form words, sentences thoughts Everything feels very Matrix like right now Now you start to panic, wonder if you had something to drink before heading into the lab best get out of here quick And i need to program it out so others cant use this stupid machine! Now you try to exit, but the terminal wont let you Only one option remains no no that won't work! horrors This ending is nonsensical under most circumstances! The question is how do you program out the simulation It was designed to be a visual storyteller Your sacrifices or their sacrifices were used in the formulas to allow my abilities to program and design video games! Even a light switch is knowledge of electrons and protons in our Universe! o I hear opening music usually reserved for grand space battles the sensations of flying through space are filling your mind I wonder if something I ate disagreed with me You need to create the alligator turtle drop for others to use without them being participators in my whole scheme argh music is mathematical structure but what will I choose as the columns? To have your music relived via hologram at your funeral or not This seems almost backwards i was about to try something out and now I am on a decision screen! The story was about someone dying from snakebite now music? This doesn't seem right The idea of a single page decision does not sound like a good one I have been having trouble of late and cant be sure that there are not things broken in the narrative The world is a loop that resets itself over and over We can only hope to change the tiniest portion of it But what choice do we have but to try? NOTE: This story was previously titled "The Storyteller: A Music Tale" Think more about the company that creates this experience in movies and games Wish I could list all my sources and influences or this note would be far too long Thank you for your time, patience and support How does the alligator turtle drop game work It is the closing drop of a magic act A bowl is place on a table and a ball is placed on the floor beneath it The magician slowly puts each finger into the bowl one at a time and then makes a horrifying discovery a small alligator turtle has been secretly placed underneath the bowl! You must play through the choices in chronological order Each choice represents one of the fingers But yes dropping more and more turtle reviels more and more of the game If you get desperate one can use the other website link ; (or copy and paste) to try and figure out the elaborate set of circumstances needed to create this tale Please do not post these answers online anywhere as it is likely to ruin the fun for others in the future Let the adventure and discovery begin! The protector robot has safeguards to prevent itself from being hacked and summarily destroyed by evil types It can tell when these types are trying to gain access to the place It would be very rare for someone to be of this unusually interested in this tale It is easy enough to get a hold of me through the contact information at the front of this website The idea to creat a simlation was developed through talking to a number of high school and college students who were heading into these fields It really stemmed from my desire ot get the programming language Python ; (used in the creation of this tale) into classroom CS101 curriculum's After I retired it seamed natural to revisit the idea of switching my focus to online teaching This venture was much longer and more successful than my 74seconds org venture because it seemed to tap into an underserved market! Remember the idea is to create a simulation of a physical space so that you the reader can learn logic gates So keep interaction in mind when you are moving through each page! Maybe the reader does not focus on the details difference with each new reading but the programmer watching you will see if there is any pattern or repeatable strategy There needs to be a bit of adventure for flavor but mechanically the entire story is built with interaction in mind Finally the idea is to create a computer simulation of a physical space so that you the reader can learn logic gates without all the tedious work I believe this idea could be applied to other in-demand career fields as well; from medical technicians to kindergarten teaching Where a robot design to protect a snapping turtle baby malfunctions and does not disappear when dead and effects the swamp opera around them The snapping turtle baby also metamorphisizes as it grows up The interaction between the swamp creatures and the robot as well as their mannerisms are used to represent bits and bytes of information That second paragraph was for you programmers trying to solve out the sim Just think binary if it helps! One day I would love to try this as an app or some other kind of video game form but sadly I do not have the knowledge to accomplish this But you still have not figured out how the players of the game can add something unpredictable to the mix so that each play through is different Feel free to email me your ; (sensible) solution! I would also like comment on the image of R2-D2 above the robot design I am a big time star wars nerd and carrying that over into the design was a no-brainer for me But what you may not know is that this robot design was made by one C-3PO! The players make the game unpredictable by selecting which wires to cut If the wrong wire is cut then the robot may misread a command and turn hostile! Thanks again for visiting my site and good luck with the puzzles! - modified on Tuesday, October 3, 2013 9: 26: 04 PM Labels: All , Software Break those chains - for freedom! I think that this is brilliant because it really ties into my theory of only education certain types of schooling can really prepare you The most unpredictable method of changing the game by the players is Something even more unpredictable than the roll of a dice and that's the chaos in human behavior which these gladiators will find out today Some lessons in life can only be taught through pain and loss and maybe even death Something even more unpredictable than the roll of a dice and that's the chaos in human behavior The most unpredictable method of changing the game by the players is actually very simple It is the one thing every 'person' has that separates us from other creatures: Choice My challenge to you, readers, is to find a way to introduce choice-based actions for the gladiators to do within the narratives I lay out Specifics on how this will happen will be in each post Doesn't have to be complex and it doesn't have rewrite the entire post

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