Troika’s Leonard Boyarsky Talks Fallout 3

Former Fallout developer Leonard Boyarsky stopped by the RPG Codex forums to discuss the Fallout 3 license and why Bethesda ended up with it instead of Troika Games. His first post:

For the record:

We never, ever bid on Fallout. One major publisher mentioned Interplay was shopping it around and would be interested in us developing it for them, but theydropped it as too expensive when they found out the asking price (not ours, Interplay’s). We never had our own money, and were just beginning to toy with the idea of independent funding near the end of our life as a business – which was after Beth had already gotten Fallout.

I did approach Bethesda about us working with them on Fallout, but they were uninterested. Instead of flaiming them for this however, think about it from their point of view: who among us would want to pay a huge amount of money for a license and then turn it over to someone else? I’m assuming they paid the $$ because they wanted to make a Fallout game, end of story.

Our post apocalyptic game was going to be something new, simply because we loved the genre. We struggled with whether to make it post apoc or not, since Beth already had Fallout, but our love for the genre outweighed other considerations.

I’m not going to go anywhere near the argument of who is responsible for Fallout’s greatness, except to say that Scott Campbell never gets the credit he deserves in all these arguments. He wrote alot of the original story and came up with alot of the characters and places as well.

Later, he posted another reply:

Beyond some very early pitch docs which revolved mostly around how cool it would be for someone to give Fallout’s ‘original creators’ (oops, I can hear Volourn typing furiously already) money to make its spritiual successor, we really never went too far with any concepts for the new post apoc game. Obviously, no one with the money to fund it thought it would be as cool as we did There seemed to be some very good interest in it at first, but nothing ever progressed beyond the early stages.

While I never got the chance to look at any of the Van Buren stuff personally, I doubt we would have wanted to use it simply because we had our own ideas of where we’d want to take FO3. As far as the engine, it wasn’t finished, and unless we had the original engineers working on it it would have been more trouble than it was worth to try to finish someone else’s engine, I believe. All this is pure speculation with no basis in reality, of course…

It also appears that he has opened up the website www.leonardboyarsky.com to show off some of his former work and his impressive resume. For the sake of us RPG fans, let’s hope Leo, Jason, and Tim end up back in the game development industry.

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