Wasteland 2 Interview

Wired has published an interview with inXile’s founder and CEO Brian Fargo, focused on Wasteland 2, or, more correctly, its Kickstarter campaign and what led to it. No offense to Fargo, but I think most of us are familiar with his thoughts on crowdfunding so I’m going to quote a more interesting (to me) bit on Wasteland’s quasi-sequels:

There were a couple of sequels planned back in 1988, Fountain of Dreams and Meantime. What happened to them?

Fountain of Dreams was an odd project because EA said, “We’re going to keep the name and do it ourselves”. We had a producer come in very late in the project, the last six months we were making Wasteland for EA. He said “This is easy; I can do better than this.” They said, “Great, you go make it because we’re not going to work with Interplay — they’re our competitors now!” Somehow, that got turned into Fountain of Dreams and I don’t know why. I don’t know if they weren’t happy with the final results and they changed the name.

As for us, I didn’t have the rights. I’d already had all the tools and systems in place to do something skill-based, top-down, tactical. But I couldn’t do Wasteland. So we thought “Let’s do something else. Let’s do a time-travel sort of game.” Of course, this all really hurt our brains because when you start thinking about cause and effect, and you’re travelling backwards and forwards in time, your head starts exploding. We put a year to a year and a half into Meantime, and I still love the idea, but it just didn’t get the momentum and we ended up killing the project. It was Fallout that became a spiritual successor and there were so many similarities.

Has success of Fallout has overshadowed the original Wasteland, and perhaps what you’re trying to do with the sequel?

There’s no doubt that Fallout has way overshadowed Wasteland; it’s a major franchise. The Fallout 1 and 2 fans have been wanting this kind of game for a long time. They like the tactical nature, the reading, the rippling effect of stuff. They’ve been holding the torch ever since. I think, if anything, on a net sum it’s enhanced it. Fallout has shown how big post-apocalyptic can be. I think it’s a net positive.