Fallout Developer Profile – Chris Avellone

No Mutants Allowed has released another Fallout Developer Profile, this time featuring Chris Avellone, who worked on both Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 (Van Buren) extensively. Only five of the questions are available so far, but Chris provides lengthy answers for all of them:

Q: Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3 (Van Buren)/Tactics ?

Q: I didn’t do anything for Fallout 1, although Tim Cain did invite me to work on it, and upon retrospect, wish I’d chosen to work on that instead.

In Fallout 2, I cleaned up Vault City (and added a lot of quests and interaction that wasn’t there previously and believe it or not, downplayed some pretty nasty sexuality that was too offensive even for me), did the Raider Camp (which sucked), New Reno (which I will still defend as a fun location to play), and a number of secret encounters, including the Guardian of Forever. Fallout 2 was the first hardcore RPG I got to work on (Torment was going concurrently, but we weren’t able to lay out levels or enter much dialogue yet). I will say that I wish I’d reduced the number of crime families in New Reno down to two or three rather than the original specifications for four, and then spent some extra time on the Raider Camp or ditched the Raider Camp entirely, especially that Walks-With-Shadows/Shadow-Who-Walks guy who was supposed to be Sulik’s arch-enemy, but that didn’t pan out either. It was another one of those (not enough time) projects, and Interplay was starving for cash again (it seemed like many people were going to get laid off if F2 didn’t ship, so it was ship or die).

In Fallout 3, I did about three-four years of pre-production, plus I did a pen-and-paper game for about a year and a half (with a second game being run concurrently to the first to cover more ground) and did the overarching original story, along with extensive maps and area design and layouts for Circle Junction, Fort Abandon (originally called Fort Aradesh, but the name changed after NCR’s control of the frontier receded), the (Big Empty) ((Big Mt) military boot camp, still manned by training robots get the word twist? Isn’t that clever? Oooooh.), the Daughters of Hecate and Caesar’s Legion (the female and male polar opposites of F3, which was supposed to allow the player, depending on gender, to rule either one and use them to build an army), the Denver Salvager Camp (I thought a location that, instead of being underground, was on the top of buildings and skyscrapers would be cool), the abandoned Boulder Dome, an ancient and nearly abandoned super think-tank (a result of watching too much Logan’s Run, but all for a good cause), and the second Zax computer, and Leavenworth Prison. I also did the companion characters Corporal Christina Royce (NCR lieutenant CNPC, used to be part of the Vault 15 squatters in F2 as Christy or something, also a tribute to Wasteland), Alkaya (tribal scout from the Circle Junction tribals), Job (Mr. Handy administrative police robot in Denver, tribute to Wasteland), Xian (cute Chinese descendent scientist in Dome), the Hanged Man (the first poisonous CNPC to join the party, like having the Jinxed Dog with you), Eddie (Crazy Horse) Galenski (smuggler who drives a Mad Max truck to haul cargo around the wastes), and his (wife,) Helen Wheels (truckers, smugglers, tribute to Wasteland), and the rival ex-NCR military PC group that’s on the same mission as the players: Gen. Coleridge, Capt. Davidson, Lt. Pierce, Major Briggs, and Matthias (Huxley) (real name: Dr. Presper, co-creator of Zax). Prepser is the (bad guy) of the piece (not really, but good enough), a cryogenically frozen scientist who went into hibernation a few days before the nuclear holocaust, woke up in the Boulder Dome, and emerged into the world to discover (to his surprise) how much (civilization) survived, before he wakes up the rest of the scientists frozen beneath the Boulder Dome. Prepser, as Scientific Advisor to the pre-war president, is the only person left alive who knows all the passwords and control schemes for the Zax computer and various other super-weapons across the world, and it was intended that the player’s actions in the various towns serve to convince Presper whether he should wipe all life from the planet before waking up the rest of his colleagues. Of course, the problem becomes that Presper and his crew are carrying the virus that struck to the US shortly before the war broke out (the virus that they had to develop FEV to counteract), so as soon as Presper gets out of the Boulder Dome, the more communities he has contact with, the more people become infected and die.

I had really high hopes for the story, but then Baldur’s Gate 3 got cancelled, Feargus left, and I realized the chances of it actually happening seemed slim to none if they were willing to ditch BG3, then Fallout was even more of a risk, and none of the execs at Interplay seemed willing to stand behind it, no matter how hard the guys worked on demonstrating they could do it.

It was really, really depressing to leave (I had been at Interplay for about 7+ years), and I loved working with the guys, but I didn’t want to waste another three years (or more) for something that was going to get flushed anyway life’s just too short.