It turns out all it takes to make one of the most influential RPGs of all time is a team of developers who just want to make each other laugh.
That was my takeaway from a recent Game Informer interview with original Fallout co-creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, as well as Interplay co-founder Brian Fargo.
Reminiscing about the very conception of Fallout, which was originally intended to be a sequel to Interplay’s Wasteland, Cain said a lot of the team’s original ideas for the game were simply intended to spark a positive reaction from the other developers.
“You weren’t trying to impose your idea; you wanted to come up with an idea that everybody on the team would go, ‘Oh, I love it! That’s really cool. You have to have that!’ That’s the reaction you wanted, not ‘I don’t know about that,’ and then you have to convince them,” said Cain. “You’d come in in the morning and go, ‘I had this really cool idea, and I think everyone’s gonna like it.’ And that went for everything from humor to monsters to weapons to unusual quest ideas.”
Speaking of humor, one of Fallout’s defining characteristics is what Boyarsky called its “dark humor,” and that too came about because everyone just wanted to make Cain laugh. For instance, the origin of the Radiation King brand of TVs, as is legend at this point, came about because Cain and Boyarsky were big fans of The Simpsons.
“A lot of the humor that came from me and [technical art director] Jason [Anderson] was literally stuff that we just wanted to try and make Tim laugh, like the Radiation King television,” said Boyarsky. “I didn’t tell him I was doing that.
“Jason would get so irritated: Me and Tim would start throwing Simpsons quotes back and forth in meetings, and so, I’m like, ‘I’m going to call this a Radiation King,’ and didn’t tell him. He didn’t see it until he saw the intro, and of course, he laughed because he thought that was a funny Simpsons reference.”
Reading about this made me nostalgic for a period I was far too young to comprehend at the time, when big game studios were just a bunch of nerds throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. That’s probably still the case for a lot of small indie developers, but AAA releases these days are generally made by hundreds, if not thousands of different people across many distinct departments. Tangentially, former Bethesda loremaster and Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann recently touched on this issue and suggested Starfield’s main problem was that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, essentially.
Bethesda made Fallout 3’s VATS system to avoid competing with Call of Duty and Battlefield, taking influence from KOTOR and Burnout: “Imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!”
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