Behind Fallout’s scenes – how the legend was created

With the release of the ambitious series from Amazon, the Fallout Game Universe gained a new impetus of popularity, thanks to which over the past week the total online parts of the series in Steam has grown more than doubled. In this regard, I decided to arrange a small excursion into the past in order to see how the original Fallout was born and through what difficulties it had to go through its creators during the development. Let’s figure it out!

Fortunately for me, for almost a year, the founding father of the series Tim Kane has been engaged in the active development of a personal channel on YouTube, where he talks about his experience in the game industry. Therefore, we have no shortage of information about the creation of his projects, and I can reinforce my text in direct quotes from the first lips.

Production

The history of Fallout begins with two key developers – already designated above the system designer Timothy Kane and the creative director of Leonard Boyarsky. Both developers at one time worked together not only on Fallout on InterPlay, but also on Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquarade – Bloodlines in Troika Games, and after the majority of projects in Obsidian Entertainment.

Their cooperation began in 1995, when on Interplay they gave green light to create a computer role -playing game using the Gurps system. At the same time, the initially interplay did not make large bets on this project. On the contrary, developers could only engage in them in their free time from their main activity. Kane recalls how he personally phoned the company’s employees with a proposal to work on this game and get a free pizza in return:

I think that the Fallout team in a sense gathered itself. These were people who were passionate about the creation of the game from the very beginning. The rest said directly that they were not going to linger for a long time in this project. They gave us such an opportunity, and we were ready to spend extra time on this. Interplay did not force us to work until late, but it was necessary if we wanted to bring the game to the release.

Despite the fact that the project developed rapidly without any noticeable obstacles in development, the release was by no means guaranteed. When InterPlay acquired the desired Dungeons & Dragons license, the company’s resources were quickly redirected to D&D games:

InterPlay immediately stated “We no longer need this game, let’s transfer your command to Descent to Undermountin”.

The rather primitive Dungeon CRAWLER from the team of Chris Avellon, who sends the players to the labyrinths of the Podgoria, where you had to reveal the secret of the loss of people in the role of a mercenary and prevent the drow’s conspiracy, having repulsed the goddess Llos herself.

The Descent 3D engine chosen by the company was extremely inappropriate for creating role -playing games, which significantly complicated the development and affected the general quality of the game. As a result, the project failed and received mainly negative reviews from the players.

At that time, the company claimed that the marketing of both games could not afford. As a result, Kane had to use all kinds of excuses to Brian Fargo in order to save Fallout:

I said that the setting is completely different, the mechanics are different, that role -playing games have long tails of sales and that people have played them for years. The key argument was that our game is cheaper and you can make twice as much money from it. Of course, it was not true, I just literally lied and begged.

In the end, Kane managed to convince Fargo, and since the company paid so much attention to its new D&D projects, the development of a relatively small game of Kane continued at the same speed.

In fact, InterPlay was so busy that only https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/free-spins-no-deposit-bonus/ at the last moment the Fallout team encountered problems when the game of the game in Europe, when it was stipulated that the developers should remove children from the game – the same killed as any other NPCs.

Given the then panic around violence in video games, only thanks to the relative obscurity Fallout did not become a participant in scandals with more conservative media. The point was not so much that the developers made the children killed, but that the game systems did not protect them in any way, and they were programmed with the same parameters as adults NPC.

Identity

One delusion is widespread on the network, according to which the original Fallout was originally conceived by the successor of the Wasteland series, but Kane refutes such statements:

People believe that the Fallout series arose on the basis of Wasteland. This is a rather natural connection, for there and there and there the game about wasteland. Even having heard the news that we are developing a game in a post -apocalyptic setting, we insisted that we do Wasteland 2. In the end, he could not get the rights to the project, and we said that the idea is certainly good, but it does not correspond to our vision. We created our own game and were not going to make it more like Wastland.

Boyarsky even admits that he never played in Wasteland, although copies of the game were lying around the office:

I had a top Pentium 486, and due to the computing power of my car, the game accelerated so much that it was physically impossible to play in it.

It is noteworthy, however, that before the developers dwelled on the theme of the post -apocalypse, the future Fallout has undergone significant changes. For a short time, the game was fantasy, then adventure with time in time, and after the science fiction about the invasion of aliens. In this period, the idea of ​​shelters arose:

We imagined this – with the invasion of the aliens, the whole world is on the verge of destruction, and people are forced to survive in underground bunkers. So we adopted the idea of ​​post -apocalypse and retained the shelters. It was a rather sharp jump.

Atmosphere

The general concept of the new post-apocalyptic role-playing game has already begun to form, although it never occurred to any of the developers to do something fundamentally unique. Boyarsky openly describes early developments as “Carried of Mad Max”, However, the characters themselves contributed to the evolution of this idea. Although, the influence of “Mad Max” is still obvious. This is the aesthetics of dirty dieselpank, spiked leather armor, arid wasteland and so on.

Unlike later games of the series, where your wandering by wastelands is often accompanied by a bang of radio playing jazz, blues, rock and roll and other old melodies, sound design of the original Fallout was much more ominous-sirens and strong desert wind, interspersed with distant cries of people and ghouls … It really contained a horror of exiting the safeRefuge in the great unknown of the post -apocalyptic wasteland.

Interestingly, this unique soundtrack arose due to the fact that Kane, along with other people, worked in a huge half-empty room, affectionately called on the Interplay “pit”:

Believe me, you cannot calmly program in a room with an echo where fax is constantly working and people are talking. Therefore, I have always been in headphones and listened to music in the embibias style. I had so many music that I gave my list to Morgan Morgan and said that I want the game to sound that way.

The list includes Discreet Music Brian Ino, Ambient Works 1 and 2 from Aphex Twin and a CDs Disk called Ambient 4: Isolationism.

Freedom of action

The Fallout Developers team created the world with extensive freedom of action and the reaction of the world to the solution of the player. Your choice can determine the future of the whole city, you can join the raiders gang and kill their captives, or vice versa to save slaves and, possibly, get a companion for yourself. Players can even literally get the final boss to death. Kane claims that such a system was not so difficult to achieve:

In a way, it was even easy. It all started with the concept of a locked door. I wanted to have many other ways to go through it in addition to hacking the castle. For example, you can steal or buy a key from a guard, kill him and pick up the key, or simply blow up the door. As soon as this system will operate on one door, it will automatically work on everyone else. The same with quests – everything goes from the concept that you can talk, fight or steal throughout the game.

Each quest had many solutions, each NPC in the game could be killed, all systems and mechanics were sharpened for such variability, which is still able to surprise both players and its creators.

Even after 25 years in the anniversary for a series of interviews, a journalist from the Dualshockers publication managed to impress Kane when he told about the murder of the High Priestess Jane – he laid a slow -off bomb in her office, and then went out of there and allowed her to explode:

You see! I, like many other people, like that you yourself have come to this. Over time, the games themselves began to tell the players what exactly they need to do when performing a quest to the smallest details. People said that they liked Fallout’s freedom, but they bought those games that the majority like-games in the spirit of “Say what I need to do so that I do it”.

Afterword

Today, RPG is a blockbuster genre intended for the mass market and offering vast worlds with many and side quests for 100 or more hours of passage. Back in 1997, role -playing games in the spirit of InterPlay projects were not only niche, but also aimed at a relatively small part of the market of interactive entertainment. You can even say that the release of Fallout in a sense was a turning point for role-playing games, turning them in the direction in which they move to this day. And the Fallout series itself, in the end, turned into a modern blockbuster demonstrating the above qualities.

The authorities did not require large sales, and InterPlay did not spend a lot of money on us even by those standards. Today you will not be able to start a project from scratch for the same funds that we had for all Fallout production. Nowadays, companies spend sixty, seventy, hundred million dollars to create a flagship RPG level of AAA. As a rule, this is the largest project of the corporation, on which a lot depends, so we need a wider audience.

Although Fargo could not turn Kane’s project into a new Wasteland, he still ultimately made a vital contribution to the identity of the game. The game planned to be released most of the development under the name Vault 13, but the far -sighted Fargo immediately wondered what will happen if it has a sequel? How to call him? Vault 14? Vault 13-2? In early 1997, shortly before the release of the game, it was Fargo who suggested calling the game Fallout.

At first I thought “well, in general, there are no“ precipitation ”here, but then after some thought I realized that I really liked this name!

And the rest you already know. The game reached the release, having received the recognition of the public, and this despite the fact that it had almost no marketing.

Most of all amuses me, how people from InterPlay after saying “yes that you! We always liked your idea!”, To which I answered” Nope, I did not like “.

Like the native of the shelter, who first appeared in the wastelands of New California, Fallout was a game that had to stand up for himself. And as soon as she appeared, she forever fixed her status of the immortal classics of the genre.