Fallout Developer Profile – Colin McComb

After a year-long hiatus, No Mutants Allowed has posted another Fallout Developer Profile, this time featuring Fallout 2 designer Colin McComb.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself, what have you accomplished in life?

A: I’ve been as a professional writer for more than 15 years. I started working at TSR straight out of college. Somehow I managed to convince them to hire me on the basis of my philosophy degree and charming personality, and I was there for about five years. I was one of the co-designers of the Birthright campaign setting, and took over (with Monte Cook) a lot of the design work on the Planescape setting when Zeb Cook left for Interplay. I put out about twenty-five to thirty gaming products at TSR, and won two Origins Awards in that batch.

I went to California because I was promised the lead design job on a Playstation Planescape game, and I was pretty psyched about it. Now, granted I’d never worked on computer games before, but this was back in the day when previous experience specifically with computer games counted for a lot less – I guess it was good enough that I’d had GAME experience.

Anyway, when I showed up, there were three Planescape games in the pipeline. Mine, Zeb Cook’s, and Avellone’s. Zeb’s turned into Stonekeep 2, Avellone’s became Torment, and mine got canceled because our managers couldn’t justify having three Planescape games. I got shuffled over to be the second designer on Torment, and I was working away happily on that when I got the call to go do dialogues and areas for Fallout 2 (specifically, Broken Hills and San Francisco, so if you hate those areas, you know who to blame now).

I got a fifteen minute introduction to the dialogue editor, and then was shoved forth to spew greatness from my brow. I probably should have asked a few more questions along the way.

Anyway, I left Black Isle in 2000, moved to Detroit with my wife (the beautiful genius, Robin Moulder), and have worked at a technology development company, freelanced some game design (Beyond Countless Doorways, published by Malhavoc Press), did some freelance game writing (see RYL: Path of the Emperor), and managed to keep writing professionally the entire time.