\u201cIt was just me working on an engine,\u201d recalled Fallout<\/em> lead Timothy Cain during his GDC 2012 postmortem<\/a> of the project, which is absolutely worth going back to watch. <\/span>\u201cI just kind of wanted to make my own engine, and nobody said no. That was just kind of the way Interplay worked in the \u201890s.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Dig into the history of Fallout<\/em>, from a developer\u2019s perspective, and you get a sense of how both the series itself and the industry it grew up in have changed since Cain first began working on the game at Interplay in 1994, just over two decades ago.<\/span><\/p>\n It didn\u2019t start out as Fallout, <\/em>of course. During his postmortem, Cain told the story of how the game, known internally as Vault13,<\/em> came to be branded Fallout <\/em>at the suggestion of Interplay’s then-CEO Brian Fargo after he took a build home to play.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFallout <\/em>had a double entendre of the radiation from the bombs and then the alternative definition, which is a lingering effect or set of consequences,\u201d Fargo, now chief of Wasteland 2<\/em> developer InXile, tells Gamasutra. \u201cPerfect for a game that stakes its rep on choice and consequence.\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n Looking back, Fargo suggests modern game developers appreciate the boon that crowdfunding and open development can be, from a playtesting and bug-stomping standpoint, compared to the QA departments and services of yore.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen we worked on Fallout<\/em> we had a QA department, but that doesn’t give you a true indication of how players will react,\u201d says Fargo, who contrasts the Kickstarted\/Early Access development of last year’s Wasteland 2<\/em> as more of a “spectator sport” than game development ever was in his days at Interplay. <\/span><\/p>\n He also advises that developers lay out a clear mission statement and vision for a project early in the production process, as in hindsight it proved a key turning point in Fallout<\/em>‘s development.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI remember us dissecting [spiritual predecessor] Wasteland 1<\/em> before V13<\/em>\/Fallout <\/em>began and breaking the key sensibilities into a vision document — things like moral dilemmas and providing a diverse pathway for players,\u201d notes Fargo, echoing Cain’s comments that the game only came together once the team wrote themselves a mission statement.<\/span><\/p>\n You can read an archived copy of that statement here<\/a>, though it’s worth noting it was written while Fallout<\/em> was still being designed to use the GURPS tabletop game license — something that changed late in development.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The game would go on to outstrip Interplay\u2019s sales expectations when it launched in the fall of \u201897, though a lot of that has to do with the fact that Interplay doesn\u2019t seem to have had very high expectations to begin with. <\/span><\/p>\n Cain noted that the project was \u201cnot a typical Interplay game,\u201d because it was built on its own custom engine (rather than say, BioWare\u2019s Infinity engine, which Interplay had the option to use) and didn\u2019t bear a well-known license.<\/span><\/p>\n (Incidentally, the question of whether to use an existing engine or roll your own<\/a> is one many developers still struggle with today, even as Unity and Epic have done their best to make their engines easily available and approachable.)<\/span><\/p>\n What\u2019s more, Cain recalls that some folks at Interplay tried to get Fallout <\/em>cancelled multiple times because they were afraid it would compete directly with the company\u2019s other projects, role-playing games based on the Forgotten Realms and Planescape licenses that had larger teams.<\/span><\/p>\n Todd Howard once estimated that roughly 80 people worked on the team that made Fallout 3, <\/em>and studio follow-up Skyrim <\/em>boasted a team size of more than 90<\/a>. By comparison, the original Fallout<\/em> was developed by a team of one for months — at its height, the game had a total team size of roughly 30 people, according to Cain, who recalls the game costing \u201cabout $3 million\u201d to develop — nearly $4.5 million in 2015 if you account for inflation.<\/span><\/p>\n That’s a significant amount of money, and I think it’s important to talk about game budgets (then and now) at a time when some developers are undercutting themselves and the industry<\/a> by asking for too little on Kickstarter, making the cost of game development seem cheaper than it is. <\/span><\/p>\n In the face of that initial outlay, Interplay started production on a new Fallout <\/em>game using the same tech and assets while the first one was still being finished, and set a strict ship date of holiday ’98. <\/span><\/p>\n Project lead Feargus Urquhart, then chief of Interplay’s Black Isle Studios and now CEO of Fallout: New Vegas<\/em> <\/em>developer<\/a> (and Black Isle spiritual successor) Obsidian Entertainment,<\/span> remembers hard lessons learned during that period about pushing yourself and your team to hit a ship date.<\/span><\/p>\n “<\/span>The biggest challenge of Fallout 2<\/em> was that we had set its launch date based upon having started it in the middle of 1997. That meant we would have about 18 months to make the game in order to get it out for Christmas of 1998,” says Urquhart. <\/span>“I pushed everyone incredibly hard to get the game done. It was pretty early in my career, so I’ll admit that we (mostly me) pushed too hard to get Fallout 2<\/em> done that year…<\/span>we ended up making most of the game in about 8 months.” <\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/dont-miss-20-years-of-fallout-lessons-learned-shipping-games-in-the-wasteland.png\")
<\/span><\/p>\n“I look back on Fallout<\/em> as probably being one of the most exciting and juvenile times of my career.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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