Fallout Interviews

In order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Fallout’s release, Dualshockers brings us this massive retrospective interview with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky that goes over the game’s development and its lasting legacy. It covers all the usual stuff, but it’s still a nice read if you’re in the mood for some nostalgia.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Each quest had myriad solutions, each NPC in the game could be killed, all the systems and mechanics were steered towards the kind of multiplicity that’s still capable of surprising both players and its own creators “We put in mechanics and the QA people, and were so shocked at how they would use them,” Cain tells me.

Even now, 25 years on, I manage to surprise Cain and Boyarsky when I recount my assassination of the High Priestess Jain by placing a timed bomb in the desk in her office then walking on out of there and letting it go off. “See, I love that you did that, and people say they like that, but over time games have become more ‘Hey, there’s a symbol here that says this is a quest giver. You get given a quest, you’re told exactly what to do,’” Cain tells me. “People say they liked what Fallout did, but when they actually go to play games, the ones they buy are the ones that the majority of people seem to be more attracted to – ‘just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.'”

Then, there’s also a much shorter interview with Feargus Urquhart where he reaffirms his desire to revisit the Fallout universe at some point. He also mentions this curious bit of Fallout lore:

During the interview, Urquhart also revealed other interesting tidbits, such as the fact that the first iteration of Fallout 3 that Interplay began to work on (even before Van Buren) was being made on a 3D engine called the NDL engine. “The NDL Engine became Netimmerse, which then became Gamebryo, which is the engine they actually ended up using for Fallout 3.” Development didn’t get far however, and the team was moved to work on Icewind Dale instead.