The Complete History of Fallout

If you’d like to reminisce about the long-running Fallout series and also enjoy having your facts all neatly arranged in one place, you should check out this massive PC Gamer retrospective that covers every Fallout game to date, lists a number of canceled Fallout projects, and shares quite a few quotes from the games’ developers.

A few sample paragraphs:

“We had no idea any of this was going on,” says Chris Avellone, designer and writer on Fallout 2 and New Vegas. “Next thing we knew, Feargus [Urquhart] was calling an emergency meeting in Black Isle and rapidly passing out area designs for Fallout 2, splitting the game areas up amongst the available—and even unavailable—designers. We all got drafted and got to work. I was working on Planescape: Torment at the time, so my double-duty on two RPGs began.

“It did feel like the heart of the team had gone,” he continues. “And all that was left were a bunch of developers working on different aspects of the game like a big patchwork beast—but there wasn’t a good ‘spine’ or ‘heart’ to the game, we were just making content as fast as we could.”

That patchwork approach to development led to a tonal clash throughout Fallout 2. Where the first game was dark, the second included wacky references to Monty Python, Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, Godzilla and more. Some were genuinely funny, sure, but plenty were off-target. “I think the loss of Leonard and Jason accounted for a lot of the loss of the dark tone,” Tim Cain explains. “And my personal rule of ‘no jokes or cultural references that made no sense to the player who didn’t understand them’ was thrown aside after I left development.”

“Fallout 2 was a slapdash project without a lot of oversight. Management didn’t have the time,” Avellone says, “As a result, people just threw in things they thought were funny—even things like character models you didn’t know what you were going to get.”

The fedora and Tommy gun-toting thugs in New Reno, whose character models don’t even look like they belong in the game, were presented to Chris Avellone without him even asking for them. “They were just done,” he explains, “And I had to make use of them even though they didn’t have the right ‘feel’… but then again, not much of New Reno did, even though there were a lot of things you could do in town.”