Josh Sawyer Video Interview

Having started his game-making career at Black Isle Studios in 1999, by now Josh Sawyer is one of the more recognizable names in the role-playing corner of the industry. His credits include Icewind Dale II, Fallout: New Vegas, and Pillars of Eternity, and this month’s hour-long episode of IGN’s Unfiltered interview show is all about him. We get a chance to learn a bit about his background and his original aspirations of becoming a tattoo artist as well as his career and the projects he worked on, including the canceled ones like Fallout 3: Van Buren and the Aliens RPG. Check it out:

You can also watch just the Aliens segment of the interview if an hour of video footage seems a bit too daunting to you:

An excerpt from the Aliens transcript:

“It did not play like a finished game,” says Sawyer, who came on as a lead designer for the game before eventually moving to project director. “There were a lot of problems with area development. We had some animation problems we were working through. There was a lot of cool stuff in it, but ultimately we weren’t building our areas at a fast enough pace and there were just some lingering problems.”

According to Sawyer, the footage that leaked back in 2013 was from a build of the game that was “one or two” milestones prior to the build Obsidian had when the game was canceled, something that Sawyer says saddened him.

“It was too little, too late honestly,” Sawyer says. “Even though I was really disappointed it got canceled, I get why it was canceled. I wasn’t like, ‘Whoa, where did this come from?’”