December 3, 2018 • 43 mins
Where did the Fallout series of games come from and how have they evolved? From its origins as a game engine experiment from Interplay to the newly released online game Fallout 76, we take a look at this popular franchise.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with iHeart radio and how stuff Works and a love
of all things tech, and people who know me know
I am a big fan of computer and video games,
(00:24):
though I don't get to play them very often. I'm
very busy. But my favorite genre of video game is
probably open world sandbox RPGs. They don't have to be fantasy,
they don't have to be science fiction. I just I
like that kind of exploration mode RPG kind of style.
(00:45):
And my love of these games dates back to when
I was a kid and I would play old paper
and pencil role playing games with friends, you know, actual
staying around the table, you got dice and all that
kind of stuff. I was also a big fan of
various computer role playing games, but keep in mind those
games in the early computer days definitely leaned much harder
(01:05):
on game mechanics rather than on actual role playing because
the limitations of the medium. You didn't typically have super
deep role playing mechanics in there. You just had a
lot of statistical mechanics to uh to negotiate stuff like combat,
for example, But I still love those games anyway. One
of my favorite series and these open world RPG genres
(01:30):
is uh the Fallout franchise, which is currently the property
of the video game developer Bethesda Softworks, but that was
not always the case. Now, first, I want to give
a quick word about the subject matter of this game series.
The game series is a game series for mature audiences
(01:50):
according to the E s r B because of the
subject matter. There's a lot of violence in the games.
The Fallout series of games take place in a post
apocalyptic setting, so it's Earth, but it's not really our Earth.
It's an Earth that has a similar history to our own,
leading up to just after World War Two, and then
(02:11):
at that point after World War two sometime between then
in present day, the Fallout universe's history goes in a
different direction than our real world history does. Within the
Fallout Universe, the United States becomes increasingly embroiled in a
conflict with countries that have communist governments, largely China, and
(02:33):
then technology continues to become more sophisticated in the Fallout Universe,
but it maintains a sort of nineteen fifties era esthetic.
Some people call it ray Gun Gothic, so you get
the sort of retro futurism thing going on, where everything
looks like the way people in the nineteen fifties imagine
the future would look like. One of the key elements
(02:56):
of Fallout is that there was a company within the
mythology of the game world called Vault Tech that started
building out nuclear bunkers across the United States UH in
the years before the nuclear war. Some of those bunkers
were purely intended as survival bunkers for a relatively small
number of citizens, but other vaults appeared to be standard
(03:18):
bomb shelters, so externally you just think, oh, this is
just a normal shelter, but in actuality, they were masking
a range of different experimental facilities meant to run tests
on unknowing human subjects. Those tests could involve anything from
using chemicals to try and manipulate people's emotions, or to
find out what happens if you put no established hierarchy
(03:41):
in place before you seal the vault shut. So, in
other words, it's all this dark science fiction, unethical type
dystopian kind of stuff now in the world of Fallout.
On October twenty three, two thousand seventy seven, the global
nuclear powers engaged in a nuclear war, and one's really
sure who fired first or but it was a full
(04:04):
retaliation and entire sections of the globe were UH irreversibly
changed or apparently irreversibly changed. People in the vaults survived
the initial blast for the most part. Some of the
experimental vaults would devolve into chaos before any of the
games would begin UH, and some people on the surface
(04:26):
of the world would manage to survive, though not necessarily unscathed.
There are mutated people called ghouls who can live to
be incredibly old, but they also tend to lose their
humanity as they get older. And then there are also
super mutants. Those are the result of various experiments with
a substance called the forced evolution virus. But you get
(04:46):
the idea, and the games try to balance a lighthearted
and sometimes absurd tone in some of the games with
some of the more serious dark themes that you find
and post apocalyptic fiction. Sometimes it works, some times it doesn't. Anyway,
that's the quick lowdown on the mythology of the game world.
Now let's talk about the history of the actual development
(05:08):
of the games, so the original Fallout game did not
come out of Bethesda Softworks. There was another company called
Interplay Productions, later known as Interplay Entertainment. It was founded
by Brian Fargo and j Patel, Rebecca Hineman, and Troy
Worl in nineteen eighty three. The studio produced some illustrated
(05:32):
text based adventures. Early on, in they released the first
game in the Bard's Tale series of computer RPGs. That
series also happens to be one that I'm really fond of,
though I would say that the gameplay of those earlier
games is much more limited than what you would find
in current generation games. I don't know that someone brand
(05:52):
new to the genre of computer role playing games would
find those old games compelling, although you can't find remastered
versions of them out there. Interplay began development on Fallout
back in nineteen four. A guy named Timothy Caine was
the lead on development. In fact, at first he was
the whole team for Fallout. Now. This was after the
(06:15):
days when video game development was handled by very very
small groups, like sometimes just one or two people. This
was past that point, uh so this was particularly small
for even for now. According to Kane, the whole game
development came about because he wanted to design his own
(06:36):
game engine. I did an episode recently on tech Stuff
about what game engines are, and he wanted to build
one of his own. And at that time, Interplay had
been using game engines that other companies had developed, and
so he said, give me a chance to make my own,
and I'll make a game around the game engine that
I create. So when he first got started, there was
(06:57):
no actual game planned. They would have to make stuff
to demonstrate the game engine, but they had no idea
of what the game would be, what its purpose would be,
what its theme would be. So Kine was just creating
this asset, this game engine. One of the early ideas
for the game would have involved the player controlling a
(07:18):
character who would travel through time, encountering science fiction and
magical elements in the past and and alternate futures, before
eventually returning to present day to rescue his girlfriend. But
that game was never meant to be, so they abandoned
that idea. Probably would have been interesting, but I doubt
that we would have found the franchise uh like Fallout anyway.
(07:41):
From there, they thought about doing a game in which
aliens had taken over the planet except for one city,
and that city would be the player's home base, and
the player would venture out to fight aliens using that
city as their base of operations. Now that eventually would
morph into the idea of Fallout, except instead of a city,
(08:02):
it was a vault that was your base of operations,
and instead of aliens, it was mutants, schools, and survivors
out in the waste land. The team tried to negotiate
with Electronic Arts to get the license for an older
post apocalyptic video game called Wasteland that e A had
published in order to make an official sequel to it,
(08:22):
but they weren't able to do it at that point,
so they started making Fallout instead. Although they really tried
to make it a sequel to Wasteland for a long time.
Fallout was unusual and that it was not a licensed game,
and it eventually was just its own new intellectual property,
and it all started as sort of a personal project.
(08:46):
Kane says that other people Interplay would stop by and
help him out early on, but this was all stuff
that had to happen outside of normal business hours because
everyone else, said the company was already assigned to other projects,
so For the first six months of developing Fallout, Timothy
Kane was the only person officially working on the game.
(09:06):
He had other people stopping in and helping him out occasionally,
but never in an official capacity. After six months, he
finally got two other people on his project. One of
them was an artist, one of them was a script or.
Both of them had the name Jason, so they became
known as Timothy and the Jason's for a while. Kane
also cited that several other examples of media h were
(09:30):
very influential for both the mechanics of Fallout and the
content the theme of the game. So one of the
big ones that he took a lot of inspiration from
was x coom that's a turn based small group tactics
and strategy game. Thematically, the electronic arts video game waste
Land was a huge influence, obviously because for a while
(09:54):
they were hoping to make a sequel, so it's kind
of a spiritual sequel to waste Land, but not and
actual thematic or or I guess thematically it's a sequel
but not not by actual content. Other influences would include
a role playing game called the Generic Universal role Playing System,
also known as Girps. Girps is a game out of
(10:15):
Steve Jackson Games. It's a paper and pencil style role
playing game, and the reason why it's called generic universal
role playing system is that, at least in theory, you
can apply those rules for all sorts of different settings.
You could do Girps and have a fantasy role playing game,
or a Western or horror based or science fiction. The
(10:38):
idea is that the basic rules can handle all the mechanics,
and then the details are up to whoever's running the
game and the players. Interplay was working on getting a
license for Girups and actually had one for a while,
and that would become the center of a really big
legal problem later on. I'll get to that in a bit.
The development process was arduous, and part of the issue
(11:02):
was that tech was changing rapidly. In the mid nineties,
games were starting to move from sprite based games to
polygonal based games, so while Fallout would stick with sprites,
one thing the game included were some talking head segments.
Characters that were voiced, often by recognizable actors, and had
(11:24):
fully animated heads that were delivering this this dialogue or
monologue to you. So you have this animation there. In
order to make that work, there was an incredibly involved process.
There was an artist assigned who would sculpt physical models
out of clay and build out a full three dimensional
(11:46):
model of the head of the character, and then use
a tool to scan the face of that clay model
to create a computer model. Then they would have to
do textures, and then ifter they got all the textures
put in place, they also have to do animation. This
process would take a really long time just to make
(12:06):
the head before you even got to the part where
you were lips sinking. The animation would take eight weeks
per head. So it's a very long and involved process.
One funny story that Timothy Kane tells about the development
is that he was told to make sure the game
would be certified for Windows. The team had made Fallout
(12:27):
to run on multiple platforms, including Windows and Windows in T,
but Microsoft denied the certification initially because it required the
program to run on Windows but to quote fail gracefully
end quote on Windows in t Kane tried to convince
(12:47):
Microsoft that the game working on in timant that it
was failing as gracefully as it gets, but that explanation
didn't fly, and so one of his other programmers actually
built into the code that Fallout would fail if it
detected it was running on a Windows in team machine,
(13:07):
so it failed on purpose. That was how they were
able to get the Windows nine certification. Interplay nearly canceled
the game twice. The first time was within its first
year of development, after the game had been you know
several months along. Interplay had acquired the rights to create
games set in the D and D Forgotten Realms universe,
(13:31):
and company executives were worried that Fallout was going to
drain resources that could be used elsewhere. Timothy Kane was
able to convince leadership, especially Brian Fargo, to allow his
team to keep working on the Fallout game. The second
time it was nearly canceled was due to a dispute
with Steve Jackson Games and the Groups role playing system
(13:51):
I talked about earlier. So Fallout was at one point
intended to be a game based on the GIRPS system,
but well into the element of the game, the team
got pushed back from Steve Jackson Games. They objected to
several things and fall Out. One was the level of violence,
because the game was incredibly violent. Another was the art style.
(14:13):
The folks over at Steve Jackson Games didn't really like it,
but it was the game was so far along in
the development process even though they were still years from launch,
they couldn't really make any changes. If they did, it
would have delayed the game even more, and interplay just
wasn't in a place financially where they could, you know,
continuously put off the release of a game. Kane was
(14:35):
told by Fargo that if his team could rewrite and
code in a new combat system that was not based
off the Groups system, if the mechanics of the game
could be completely unique and not dependent upon that RPG
within two weeks, then they would not cancel Fallout. That's
(14:55):
a huge amount of work to do in just two weeks,
but somehow they managed to do it and fall outstayed alive.
The original name for this game was Vault, but Brian
Fargo played it and then said we should come up
with a better game name and said, why don't we
call it Fallout, And Timothy Kane said, no, that's perfect.
It's a great name. Let's go with it. By the
time the game shipped, the number of people who had
(15:18):
worked on it was around thirty and there was never
an official budget that Timothy Kane ever encountered, but he
said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars.
That's when Fallout would publish. It was called Fallout, a
post nuclear role playing game. It featured a camera angle
(15:40):
that's technically called trimetric projection. That's essentially a way to
represent a three dimensional object in two dimensional space, and
it's a slightly overhead angled view similar to isometric, but
technically it's trimetric. The game introduced a lot of stuff
that has become in trends to fall Out lore, including
(16:02):
the character traits that your character possesses, which is called special.
That's an acronym that stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility,
and luck. This was the replacement of that Girp's system
they had been using, So your character has ranks in
each of those that determines his or her abilities and
(16:23):
chance of success for certain types of actions. I've got
more to say about the Fallout games, but before I
get into it, let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsor. So in that first Fallout game, the player
(16:44):
controls a character known as the Vault dweller obviously, is
someone who has lived all their life in a vault.
They've been in the protective confines of the bunker since
they were born. The year in Fallout one is twenty
one six d one. And remember the nuclear war in
the Fallout world happened in twenty seven, so it's almost
(17:07):
been a century since the nuclear war, so several generations
have been born and have died in the vault since
that time. Your vault that you live in needs a
new water purification chip because obviously the water in the
area has radiation. It's toxic, so it needs this purifier
(17:28):
and so that is why you are sent out of
the vault. You're told to go out find a water
purification chip and bring it back or else everyone's going
to die. So the action and Fallout one was turn based,
which meant that all combat would take place in rounds
rather than in real time. The game would keep track
of how much time has passed in game, and initially
(17:51):
players had just one hundred in game days to retrieve
the water purification chip before everyone back at the vault
would die, though there were ways to extend that deadline
a bit if you encountered certain water caravans and hired
them to bring water to your home. Now, this was
just the first part of the game. Getting the water
purification chip and coming back to your vault did not
(18:14):
end the game, but it wasn't necessary step in order
to progress through the story, and Timothy Kane would later
say that he wished they had left out the time
dependent component because he said it didn't work the way
we had intended. They wanted to create a way of
of building a sense of urgency to make the player
(18:36):
feel like they need to get certain things done and
not just wander around. But then Timothy Kane said that
he came around to feel that this was a bad
choice because it would discourage players from just exploring and
experiencing the game. So and later versions this got patched out,
but in the original one, that first major part of
your mission you had to complete within a certain time
(18:58):
or the game was over. The game introduced ghouls, super mutants,
introduced a faction called the Brotherhood of Steel. They're known
for wearing these big exoskeleton armor suits and they tend
to hoard technology, and the purpose for that is that
they want to protect humanity from another catastrophe like nuclear war. Essentially,
(19:19):
they're saying mankind is irresponsible and they cannot handle the
power of these massive weapons, so we're gonna take them
so that no one else can. It's a little hypocritical,
but that's part of the element of the story that
plays out in the Fallout universe. It's meant to be
that way. In fact, one of the important things that
(19:40):
Timothy Caine and his group wanted to do was create
a game that did not have a strict morality to it.
The various factions have their good points and they're bad points,
apart from some of the ones that are just kind
of almost mindless destruction machines, but almost everyone has their
they're good aspects and their bad aspects, and even the
(20:03):
player can choose to behave in a way that's ethical
or unethical. The Timothy Kane did not want to put
restrictions on what players could do. He did want there
to be consequences to your actions. So if you choose
to do terrible, terrible things, let's say in the context
of a town, then the people of that town are
going to recognize that you're terrible, terrible person and they
(20:25):
will treat you as such. But you can still choose
to do it that way, you're not prevented from behaving
any particular way. So these are all basic elements of
Fallout that would become core components of the mythology and
the world building that would move forward and would be
carried forward in future titles, and it became the foundation
(20:47):
for all future games. It also creates some gameplay elements
that would last from iteration to iteration. So one of
those was the perk system. So again in fall Out,
you have your basic abilities, those special abilities, but then
you also have skills, like you might have lock picking
or energy weapons as a skill, so you can build
up your skills that you're better at those things than
(21:10):
other things. But the parks system was added super late
in the game to give a little more umph to
the leveling in within it. So the perks might involve
kind of interesting features, like a mutation that gives you benefits,
or that you do more damage during night hours than
you do in day hours, or you might be able
(21:31):
to find more resources when you scavenge that kind of stuff.
According to Kane, it was actually really easy to insert
this into the game, which is good because it was
introduced very late in the game's development, and it was
effectively invented by a guy named Chris Taylor in just
a day. The benefit was that the parks really gave
players more opportunities to customize their character and to customize
(21:53):
their play style. It also set a precedent for the
way these games end. In Fallout, you typically have your
main quest and a bunch of side quests that you
can elect to pursue or ignore, and as you make choices,
the game takes note of the choices you have made.
At the conclusion of the game, when you have completed
the main storyline, you get a slide show like presentation
(22:17):
that tells you how things unfold in the world because
of the decisions you made, both the good ones and
the bad ones, and this would become a hallmark of
the series, even as other elements of Fallout would change dramatically.
One other thing that became a hallmark was the presence
of Ron Perlman as one of the voice actors in
(22:39):
many of the Fallout games. He acts as the narrator
for the game. He opens the games with the emblematic phrase,
the iconic phrase war war never changes. He hasn't narrated
every single game, but most of them, and he has
been a voice actor in almost every single game as well.
The first game sold well and was praised by critics,
(23:02):
and it led to the decision to develop a sequel.
No big surprise there. Interplay, which by now was called
Interplay Entertainment, created a division within the company, so as
a studio within Interplay Entertainment, and it was called Black
Isle Studios. That internal department would take on responsibility a
developing Fallout two. Several of the people who worked on
(23:25):
that had also worked on Fallout, but technically speaking, Black
Asle Studios came into being towards the end of Fallouts development,
and fall Out one was not officially part of Black
Asle Studios work, although some of the people who would
be in Black Asle Studios did work on Fallout one.
Fallout two takes place years after the first game, and
(23:47):
the player controls the descendant of the character from Fallout one,
and the goal and Fallout two, which features similar mechanics
and graphics from the first game, is to recover a
machine called the Get G E c K, and the
Get is supposed to be able to restore irradiated environments
to their pre apocalypse status. It would become a big
(24:10):
part of Fallout three as well. The game was a
bit more absurd in tone than Fallout one and made
some fans a little uneasy that the the humor got
a little more zany in the second game. That's a
trend that's continued as well. The Focused team was able
to publish Fallout two just a year after the release
(24:32):
of the first Fallout, although again a lot of the work,
the game engine and a lot of the assets had
already been developed, so that was a big part of it.
But still was a huge effort to turn a game
around in one year, and it was bigger in scope
and included some new features as well. It wasn't like
it was just a new story built on the bones
(24:52):
of Fallout one. It was more than that. In Interplay
filed its initial public offering and also financing from a
French game company called Titus Software. In two thousand, Interplay
founder Brian Fargo would resign from the company he had
co founded after having some disagreements with Titus about the
(25:14):
direction of Interplay. Fargo would leave and go on to
found a new company in two thousand two called in
Exile Entertainment, and years later this company would produce waste
Land To the sequel that Timothy Kane had wanted to
make years earlier, and it would become its own thing,
eventually evolving it to fall Out, the the one that
(25:36):
Timothy Kane worked on Now you had in exile creating
the actual sequel waste Land To. Also, they created a
sequel to Or. They created the remaster to the Bard's
Tale series, which was nice back to fall Out, though.
The next game in the franchise came from a totally
different developer and publisher. It was a game called Fallout Tactics.
(25:57):
Brotherhood of Steel, a company micro Forte, developed it, and
another company called fourteen Degrees East published it back in
two thousand one. This was different from Fallout one and
Fallout two. Those were those sort of open world isometric
view more or less isometric really trimetric view RPGs. Fallout
(26:18):
Tactics was a tactical combat game, a little bit closer
to Xcom than Fallout, so it wasn't as much of
a role playing game. Some of the elements would become
canon and later Fallout entries, but a lot of what
happened in that game is considered non canon. In other words,
is not part of the official history of the Fallout mythology.
(26:39):
The Fallout games are not perfectly consistent. That's a nice
way of putting it. There are a lot of inconsistencies
from game to game, things that seem to contradict previously
established lore, but a lot of Fallout Tactics was just
thrown out. The game did get really good reviews, however.
It was a well does signed tactical game, but there
(27:01):
were some Fallout fans who were disappointed because it wasn't
a role playing game the way the first two in
the series were. In two thousand four, Interplay produced Fallout
Brotherhood of Steel, which, despite the similar title, is a
different game than Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel, which is confusing.
I know. This game wasn't an open world style game either.
(27:24):
It had a much more linear storyline, and you would
progress from the beginning all the way through to the end,
and you couldn't really backtrack. You couldn't go back and
revisit stuff that you had already seen. It was always
moving forward. This was the first Fallout game developed specifically
for game consoles. Both the two thousand one and two
thousand four games allowed players to control Brotherhood of Steel characters.
(27:46):
You could also play the Vault Dweller from the original
Fallout game as a character in the two thousand four game.
And I've never played the two thousand four game, but
in general it got pretty mixed to negative reviews. A
lot of people consider it the weakest game that's related
to the Fallout series, and a lot of folks just
don't pay attention to it. Now. I have a little
(28:08):
bit more to say about the Fallout franchise, but before
I get to that, let's take another quick break to
thank our sponsor. While Interplay Entertainment was at work on
Fallout Brotherhood of Steel for the game consoles, the black
Isle Studio division within Interplay was working on several titles,
(28:33):
among them what was supposed to be Fallout three. This
also gets confusing because it's the same company. You have
a division within the company working on one game, and
then you have the overall company working on another game,
both of them in the same franchise. Uh. I don't
pretend to understand the business side of all this, but
it is interesting to me. The code name for the
(28:55):
black Isle Studios Fallout three game was called Van Buren.
The player was to control a character who started off
the game in prison. Then the character would be thrust
in the middle of a conflict between the Brotherhood of
Steel faction and a relatively young New California Republic group.
(29:15):
But Interplay went bankrupt in two thousand three and black
Isle Studios shut down. Everyone on the black Isle Studios
staff was laid off. Some of the elements of Van
Buren would eventually find their way into a future Fallout game.
More on that in just a bit, But this version
of Fallout three died because the studio that was developing
(29:37):
it was no more. Interplay continued to exist, by the way,
even though it was bankrupt um, but black Isle Studios
was folded. So then we get to Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda
Softworks started back in six and it was known for
making lots of different games, including the Elder Scroll series.
(29:58):
In two thousand four, beth As announced it had secured
the licensed rights to create a single player Fallout game,
and they had secured these rights from Interplay, so they
were paying Interplay so that they could create a Fallout game. Interplay, meanwhile,
was in the middle of overseeing a Fallout based massively
multiplayer online game MMO and this was being developed by
(30:21):
another company at the time called Masthead Studios. In two
thousand and seven, Bethesda negotiated to purchase the intellectual property
of Fallout outright from Interplay for five point seven five
million dollars. Interplay was still going to be allowed to
work on this MMO, which was known as Fallout Online,
(30:43):
so the idea was Bethesda would work on the single
player game and Interplay would oversee the development of this
online multiplayer game. This remained the case until two thousand nine,
and then Bethesda Softworks announced it was going to send
the license it had granted to Interplay for the Fallout MMO,
(31:05):
and the reasoning for Bethesda's decision was that the Bethesda
claimed Interplay had failed to meet its obligations to get
proper funding together and to enter into full scale development
on time, and so according to Bethesda Softworks, Interplay was
in breach of contract. Interplay disputed these claims, and it
(31:28):
all eventually headed toward court. Eventually the two companies would
arrive at a settlement agreement, but part of that agreement
was that Interplay would officially cancel the Fallout Online project,
and so I got the AX. While all that was
unfolding in courts. Bethesda was developing its own Fallout single
(31:49):
player game in house, and it started in July two
four UH. Much of the early work was limited because
the studio was also in full production mode for the
fourth game in the Elder Scrolls franchise. The new game
that they were working on would become Fallout three, which
had a dramatically different gameplay approach than Fallout one or two.
(32:13):
Rather than that third person tri metric view of Fallout
one and Fallout to, Fallout three could be played first
person style, so from the perspective of the player, you
were in a three D world and you saw through
your character's eyes, or you could play as kind of
a sort of over the shoulder third person view if
(32:34):
you wanted to. The game was largely true to the
thematic and stylistic elements of its predecessors, despite this new
approach to presenting the world to the players, so while
while on a gameplay level it was dramatically different, it
was true to the tone and themes of the pre
(32:56):
existing Fallout games. It's also the first Fallout game I
ever played, so I have a really soft spot in
my heart for Fallout three in that game. You play
as a character who was born in a vault. Your
father has mysteriously disappeared, so you're searching for him out
in the waste Land, and it leads you on an
adventure through the post apocalyptic Washington, d C. Area. That
(33:19):
game came out in October two eight. It was another
big success, despite having some pretty weird bugs. A lot
of Bethesda Softworks games launch with some odd bugs in them.
There are numerous videos on YouTube of Bethesda Softworks games
in which things are not behaving the way they should,
(33:42):
and that's true for Fallout, it's true for Skyrim. That
doesn't mean they're bad games. It just means weird stuff
sometimes happens in them for no apparent reason. But then
Bethesda had seen that the success of Fallout three met
there really should be a sequel. However, the in house
developed first were already working on the next Elder Scrolls game,
(34:03):
which would be Skyrim, so they didn't have the resources
to dedicate to another Fallout game. But they wanted to
strike while the iron was hot, so but Thesda partnered
with another game developer company called Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian was
founded in two thousand three by several former Black Isle
Studio employees, in other words, people who had come from Interplay.
(34:28):
Some of them had worked on the previous Fallout games
like Fallout one and Fallout two, and now they were
going to work on the next Fallout game, skipping over
Fallout three. So I thought that was really interesting that
some of those people had gone on to found their
own company and they started working on an i P
that they had been involved with years and years before.
So I'm sitting and got to work on the next
(34:49):
Fallout game, and it would rely on the same game
engine as Fallout three. It had numerous tweaks to the
Fallout three source code, so it wasn't exactly the same thing,
but kind of like how Fallout two was able to
take advantage of assets that were built for fall Out one,
Fallout New Vegas, which was the next game in the series,
took advantage of the stuff that was built for Fallout three.
(35:12):
This game would incorporate some of the elements that have
been intended for Van Buren. So you remember when I
said some of those ideas that the original Interplay team
had in mind for Fallout three, they found their way
in to fall Out New Vegas, including this concept of
the new California Republic and its conflicts with the Brotherhood
of Steel. New Vegas came out in t and like
(35:37):
Fallout three, it was met with with pretty good praise,
also had some silly bugs in it. I actually really
like New Vegas a lot. Has a very different tone
in many ways than Fallout three and later fall Out
games do, but I still found it a lot of fun,
and I didn't think it was different enough to be
(35:58):
a problem, so I personally enjoy it. At E three,
Bethesda Softworks had a couple of really big announcements, and
one was that the studio had developed a Fallout themed
mobile game called Fallout Shelter, in which you play is
the overseer of a vault. You manage what goes on
inside it, you build out rooms, and you scavenge and
(36:20):
essentially it's a kind of a management SIMS style game.
A light one because it was meant for mobile platforms
and eventually came out for other platforms as well. That
was a fun E three event because they announced the
game and then they announced it's available right now. You
can go ahead and download it right now, which was
a power move to announce a game that had been
(36:40):
kept completely secret and then reveal that it was available
that day. But the bigger announcement from that E three
was for Fallout four, which was set in New England,
specifically in the Boston area, and it featured the largest
Fallout map up to that point. Now, in that game,
you would play as a character who was actually alive
(37:02):
on the day that there was global nuclear war, but
you and your spouse and your child make it into
a vault and then you get cryogenically frozen upon entering
the vault. That was the experiment of this vault was
to do experiments on cryogenic freezing, so you are effectively
(37:23):
asleep and miss out on all the fun waste land
stuff until you get thawed out, and then you go
on a quest to try and rescue your character's son
who was kidnapped while you were on ice. The most
recent title in the Fallout series aims to do what
Interplay wanted to do back in the mid two thousand's,
sort of. The most recent one is Fallout seventy six,
(37:45):
and it's an online multiplayer game. In that game, you
play as someone from a vault that opens up in
twenty one oh two, so it's just twenty five years
after the nuclear war happened, and that makes about seventy
six the earliest game in the chronology of the Fallout
series if you look at the years that the individual
(38:08):
games are set in. Bethesda made several choices that fans found,
let's say, controversial, and one of them is it's an
online game. You're always playing with other people, and other
people can be jerks, so there's a lot of concern
about griefing. Another concern is that Bethesda wanted players to
control the only humans in the game. So if you
(38:30):
see a human as you play Fallow seventy, you know
that's being controlled by another human being. But that limits
your interactions within the game itself. You can only interact
really with other players and then the occasional robot, maybe
a couple of other NBC like characters. But most of
the time you're if you're hearing anything, it's from a
prerecorded message that's on a hollow tape that you can play,
(38:54):
and that seems to be less compelling than having interactions
with computer controlled characters. Um, you're just you know, listening
to recording after recording after recording, you'll find bodies of
other people as you wander around. Some of those bodies
appear to be fairly fresh, but you won't actually find
any human characters unless they're played by other players, and
(39:16):
the drop and interaction is a sore spot for some people.
The game also features a camp building mechanic that lets
the player establish a base of operations, which is similar
to a base building mechanic that Bethesda introduced for Fall
Up four. Some players really love that aspect of the game.
Other players really hate it. They find it tedious and frustrating,
(39:38):
and to be fair, the tools for building out these
are not necessarily the most intuitive or user friendly. Follow
Up seventy six is set in the Virginia region, and
it includes several nods to local folklore, such as the
Mothman legend. That game has received mixed reviews, lots of
people complaining about the lack of a cohesive story. There's
(39:59):
some complaints about feeling like there's a huge space with
not a lot to do there, that that there doesn't
seem to be enough of a sense of purpose in
the game, and that ultimately it can be a very
frustrating or unfulfilling experience for people. I've only played a
(40:23):
little bit of it, but I can definitely see where
the criticisms are coming from. It is a very different
game than say, Fallout four, and uh, I don't hate it,
but I certainly don't find it as compelling an experience
as the single player games were, where you had a
much more focused storyline and world building effort there that
(40:47):
made it easier to inhabit the world and follow Out
seventy six. Everything is instanced, which means you can run
into the same things over and over and over again.
Um and a lot off your experience depends upon other
people who are in the game, so it is a
very different experience. That's the Fallout history up until today.
(41:08):
To get into the lore would take you could do
a whole podcast, like you could dedicate a podcast to
fall Out lore, because there's so much that's been left
in all those different games, and it gets incredibly detailed,
and then you know, you don't have to dedicate entire
episodes too inconsistencies and contradictions that have happened within the
(41:28):
course of these games coming out. I am not going
to do that. That is too much work for me.
But I wanted to dedicate an episode to a franchise
that I really enjoy, even though it is not always
met with the same critical reception throughout every entry in
the series, but it is one worth checking out if
(41:49):
you're a gamer to to see if maybe that kind
of genre appeals to you. It definitely has a very
you hate to say, very unique. It definitely has a
unique aesthetic and perspective. I don't think that it always
handles the balance between comedy and drama really well, but
(42:12):
it's still really compelling. And that's it for this episode.
If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff,
whether it's a technology, a company, person in tech, maybe
it's just a general tech topic you think it would
be interesting to hear more about, send me an email
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(42:35):
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(43:19):
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(43:44):
Is it how stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with iHeart radio and how stuff Works and a love
of all things tech, and people who know me know
I am a big fan of computer and video games,
(00:24):
though I don't get to play them very often. I'm
very busy. But my favorite genre of video game is
probably open world sandbox RPGs. They don't have to be fantasy,
they don't have to be science fiction. I just I
like that kind of exploration mode RPG kind of style.
(00:45):
And my love of these games dates back to when
I was a kid and I would play old paper
and pencil role playing games with friends, you know, actual
staying around the table, you got dice and all that
kind of stuff. I was also a big fan of
various computer role playing games, but keep in mind those
games in the early computer days definitely leaned much harder
(01:05):
on game mechanics rather than on actual role playing because
the limitations of the medium. You didn't typically have super
deep role playing mechanics in there. You just had a
lot of statistical mechanics to uh to negotiate stuff like combat,
for example, But I still love those games anyway. One
of my favorite series and these open world RPG genres
(01:30):
is uh the Fallout franchise, which is currently the property
of the video game developer Bethesda Softworks, but that was
not always the case. Now, first, I want to give
a quick word about the subject matter of this game series.
The game series is a game series for mature audiences
(01:50):
according to the E s r B because of the
subject matter. There's a lot of violence in the games.
The Fallout series of games take place in a post
apocalyptic setting, so it's Earth, but it's not really our Earth.
It's an Earth that has a similar history to our own,
leading up to just after World War Two, and then
(02:11):
at that point after World War two sometime between then
in present day, the Fallout universe's history goes in a
different direction than our real world history does. Within the
Fallout Universe, the United States becomes increasingly embroiled in a
conflict with countries that have communist governments, largely China, and
(02:33):
then technology continues to become more sophisticated in the Fallout Universe,
but it maintains a sort of nineteen fifties era esthetic.
Some people call it ray Gun Gothic, so you get
the sort of retro futurism thing going on, where everything
looks like the way people in the nineteen fifties imagine
the future would look like. One of the key elements
(02:56):
of Fallout is that there was a company within the
mythology of the game world called Vault Tech that started
building out nuclear bunkers across the United States UH in
the years before the nuclear war. Some of those bunkers
were purely intended as survival bunkers for a relatively small
number of citizens, but other vaults appeared to be standard
(03:18):
bomb shelters, so externally you just think, oh, this is
just a normal shelter, but in actuality, they were masking
a range of different experimental facilities meant to run tests
on unknowing human subjects. Those tests could involve anything from
using chemicals to try and manipulate people's emotions, or to
find out what happens if you put no established hierarchy
(03:41):
in place before you seal the vault shut. So, in
other words, it's all this dark science fiction, unethical type
dystopian kind of stuff now in the world of Fallout.
On October twenty three, two thousand seventy seven, the global
nuclear powers engaged in a nuclear war, and one's really
sure who fired first or but it was a full
(04:04):
retaliation and entire sections of the globe were UH irreversibly
changed or apparently irreversibly changed. People in the vaults survived
the initial blast for the most part. Some of the
experimental vaults would devolve into chaos before any of the
games would begin UH, and some people on the surface
(04:26):
of the world would manage to survive, though not necessarily unscathed.
There are mutated people called ghouls who can live to
be incredibly old, but they also tend to lose their
humanity as they get older. And then there are also
super mutants. Those are the result of various experiments with
a substance called the forced evolution virus. But you get
(04:46):
the idea, and the games try to balance a lighthearted
and sometimes absurd tone in some of the games with
some of the more serious dark themes that you find
and post apocalyptic fiction. Sometimes it works, some times it doesn't. Anyway,
that's the quick lowdown on the mythology of the game world.
Now let's talk about the history of the actual development
(05:08):
of the games, so the original Fallout game did not
come out of Bethesda Softworks. There was another company called
Interplay Productions, later known as Interplay Entertainment. It was founded
by Brian Fargo and j Patel, Rebecca Hineman, and Troy
Worl in nineteen eighty three. The studio produced some illustrated
(05:32):
text based adventures. Early on, in they released the first
game in the Bard's Tale series of computer RPGs. That
series also happens to be one that I'm really fond of,
though I would say that the gameplay of those earlier
games is much more limited than what you would find
in current generation games. I don't know that someone brand
(05:52):
new to the genre of computer role playing games would
find those old games compelling, although you can't find remastered
versions of them out there. Interplay began development on Fallout
back in nineteen four. A guy named Timothy Caine was
the lead on development. In fact, at first he was
the whole team for Fallout. Now. This was after the
(06:15):
days when video game development was handled by very very
small groups, like sometimes just one or two people. This
was past that point, uh so this was particularly small
for even for now. According to Kane, the whole game
development came about because he wanted to design his own
(06:36):
game engine. I did an episode recently on tech Stuff
about what game engines are, and he wanted to build
one of his own. And at that time, Interplay had
been using game engines that other companies had developed, and
so he said, give me a chance to make my own,
and I'll make a game around the game engine that
I create. So when he first got started, there was
(06:57):
no actual game planned. They would have to make stuff
to demonstrate the game engine, but they had no idea
of what the game would be, what its purpose would be,
what its theme would be. So Kine was just creating
this asset, this game engine. One of the early ideas
for the game would have involved the player controlling a
(07:18):
character who would travel through time, encountering science fiction and
magical elements in the past and and alternate futures, before
eventually returning to present day to rescue his girlfriend. But
that game was never meant to be, so they abandoned
that idea. Probably would have been interesting, but I doubt
that we would have found the franchise uh like Fallout anyway.
(07:41):
From there, they thought about doing a game in which
aliens had taken over the planet except for one city,
and that city would be the player's home base, and
the player would venture out to fight aliens using that
city as their base of operations. Now that eventually would
morph into the idea of Fallout, except instead of a city,
(08:02):
it was a vault that was your base of operations,
and instead of aliens, it was mutants, schools, and survivors
out in the waste land. The team tried to negotiate
with Electronic Arts to get the license for an older
post apocalyptic video game called Wasteland that e A had
published in order to make an official sequel to it,
(08:22):
but they weren't able to do it at that point,
so they started making Fallout instead. Although they really tried
to make it a sequel to Wasteland for a long time.
Fallout was unusual and that it was not a licensed game,
and it eventually was just its own new intellectual property,
and it all started as sort of a personal project.
(08:46):
Kane says that other people Interplay would stop by and
help him out early on, but this was all stuff
that had to happen outside of normal business hours because
everyone else, said the company was already assigned to other projects,
so For the first six months of developing Fallout, Timothy
Kane was the only person officially working on the game.
(09:06):
He had other people stopping in and helping him out occasionally,
but never in an official capacity. After six months, he
finally got two other people on his project. One of
them was an artist, one of them was a script or.
Both of them had the name Jason, so they became
known as Timothy and the Jason's for a while. Kane
also cited that several other examples of media h were
(09:30):
very influential for both the mechanics of Fallout and the
content the theme of the game. So one of the
big ones that he took a lot of inspiration from
was x coom that's a turn based small group tactics
and strategy game. Thematically, the electronic arts video game waste
Land was a huge influence, obviously because for a while
(09:54):
they were hoping to make a sequel, so it's kind
of a spiritual sequel to waste Land, but not and
actual thematic or or I guess thematically it's a sequel
but not not by actual content. Other influences would include
a role playing game called the Generic Universal role Playing System,
also known as Girps. Girps is a game out of
(10:15):
Steve Jackson Games. It's a paper and pencil style role
playing game, and the reason why it's called generic universal
role playing system is that, at least in theory, you
can apply those rules for all sorts of different settings.
You could do Girps and have a fantasy role playing game,
or a Western or horror based or science fiction. The
(10:38):
idea is that the basic rules can handle all the mechanics,
and then the details are up to whoever's running the
game and the players. Interplay was working on getting a
license for Girups and actually had one for a while,
and that would become the center of a really big
legal problem later on. I'll get to that in a bit.
The development process was arduous, and part of the issue
(11:02):
was that tech was changing rapidly. In the mid nineties,
games were starting to move from sprite based games to
polygonal based games, so while Fallout would stick with sprites,
one thing the game included were some talking head segments.
Characters that were voiced, often by recognizable actors, and had
(11:24):
fully animated heads that were delivering this this dialogue or
monologue to you. So you have this animation there. In
order to make that work, there was an incredibly involved process.
There was an artist assigned who would sculpt physical models
out of clay and build out a full three dimensional
(11:46):
model of the head of the character, and then use
a tool to scan the face of that clay model
to create a computer model. Then they would have to
do textures, and then ifter they got all the textures
put in place, they also have to do animation. This
process would take a really long time just to make
(12:06):
the head before you even got to the part where
you were lips sinking. The animation would take eight weeks
per head. So it's a very long and involved process.
One funny story that Timothy Kane tells about the development
is that he was told to make sure the game
would be certified for Windows. The team had made Fallout
(12:27):
to run on multiple platforms, including Windows and Windows in T,
but Microsoft denied the certification initially because it required the
program to run on Windows but to quote fail gracefully
end quote on Windows in t Kane tried to convince
(12:47):
Microsoft that the game working on in timant that it
was failing as gracefully as it gets, but that explanation
didn't fly, and so one of his other programmers actually
built into the code that Fallout would fail if it
detected it was running on a Windows in team machine,
(13:07):
so it failed on purpose. That was how they were
able to get the Windows nine certification. Interplay nearly canceled
the game twice. The first time was within its first
year of development, after the game had been you know
several months along. Interplay had acquired the rights to create
games set in the D and D Forgotten Realms universe,
(13:31):
and company executives were worried that Fallout was going to
drain resources that could be used elsewhere. Timothy Kane was
able to convince leadership, especially Brian Fargo, to allow his
team to keep working on the Fallout game. The second
time it was nearly canceled was due to a dispute
with Steve Jackson Games and the Groups role playing system
(13:51):
I talked about earlier. So Fallout was at one point
intended to be a game based on the GIRPS system,
but well into the element of the game, the team
got pushed back from Steve Jackson Games. They objected to
several things and fall Out. One was the level of violence,
because the game was incredibly violent. Another was the art style.
(14:13):
The folks over at Steve Jackson Games didn't really like it,
but it was the game was so far along in
the development process even though they were still years from launch,
they couldn't really make any changes. If they did, it
would have delayed the game even more, and interplay just
wasn't in a place financially where they could, you know,
continuously put off the release of a game. Kane was
(14:35):
told by Fargo that if his team could rewrite and
code in a new combat system that was not based
off the Groups system, if the mechanics of the game
could be completely unique and not dependent upon that RPG
within two weeks, then they would not cancel Fallout. That's
(14:55):
a huge amount of work to do in just two weeks,
but somehow they managed to do it and fall outstayed alive.
The original name for this game was Vault, but Brian
Fargo played it and then said we should come up
with a better game name and said, why don't we
call it Fallout, And Timothy Kane said, no, that's perfect.
It's a great name. Let's go with it. By the
time the game shipped, the number of people who had
(15:18):
worked on it was around thirty and there was never
an official budget that Timothy Kane ever encountered, but he
said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars.
That's when Fallout would publish. It was called Fallout, a
post nuclear role playing game. It featured a camera angle
(15:40):
that's technically called trimetric projection. That's essentially a way to
represent a three dimensional object in two dimensional space, and
it's a slightly overhead angled view similar to isometric, but
technically it's trimetric. The game introduced a lot of stuff
that has become in trends to fall Out lore, including
(16:02):
the character traits that your character possesses, which is called special.
That's an acronym that stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility,
and luck. This was the replacement of that Girp's system
they had been using, So your character has ranks in
each of those that determines his or her abilities and
(16:23):
chance of success for certain types of actions. I've got
more to say about the Fallout games, but before I
get into it, let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsor. So in that first Fallout game, the player
(16:44):
controls a character known as the Vault dweller obviously, is
someone who has lived all their life in a vault.
They've been in the protective confines of the bunker since
they were born. The year in Fallout one is twenty
one six d one. And remember the nuclear war in
the Fallout world happened in twenty seven, so it's almost
(17:07):
been a century since the nuclear war, so several generations
have been born and have died in the vault since
that time. Your vault that you live in needs a
new water purification chip because obviously the water in the
area has radiation. It's toxic, so it needs this purifier
(17:28):
and so that is why you are sent out of
the vault. You're told to go out find a water
purification chip and bring it back or else everyone's going
to die. So the action and Fallout one was turn based,
which meant that all combat would take place in rounds
rather than in real time. The game would keep track
of how much time has passed in game, and initially
(17:51):
players had just one hundred in game days to retrieve
the water purification chip before everyone back at the vault
would die, though there were ways to extend that deadline
a bit if you encountered certain water caravans and hired
them to bring water to your home. Now, this was
just the first part of the game. Getting the water
purification chip and coming back to your vault did not
(18:14):
end the game, but it wasn't necessary step in order
to progress through the story, and Timothy Kane would later
say that he wished they had left out the time
dependent component because he said it didn't work the way
we had intended. They wanted to create a way of
of building a sense of urgency to make the player
(18:36):
feel like they need to get certain things done and
not just wander around. But then Timothy Kane said that
he came around to feel that this was a bad
choice because it would discourage players from just exploring and
experiencing the game. So and later versions this got patched out,
but in the original one, that first major part of
your mission you had to complete within a certain time
(18:58):
or the game was over. The game introduced ghouls, super mutants,
introduced a faction called the Brotherhood of Steel. They're known
for wearing these big exoskeleton armor suits and they tend
to hoard technology, and the purpose for that is that
they want to protect humanity from another catastrophe like nuclear war. Essentially,
(19:19):
they're saying mankind is irresponsible and they cannot handle the
power of these massive weapons, so we're gonna take them
so that no one else can. It's a little hypocritical,
but that's part of the element of the story that
plays out in the Fallout universe. It's meant to be
that way. In fact, one of the important things that
(19:40):
Timothy Caine and his group wanted to do was create
a game that did not have a strict morality to it.
The various factions have their good points and they're bad points,
apart from some of the ones that are just kind
of almost mindless destruction machines, but almost everyone has their
they're good aspects and their bad aspects, and even the
(20:03):
player can choose to behave in a way that's ethical
or unethical. The Timothy Kane did not want to put
restrictions on what players could do. He did want there
to be consequences to your actions. So if you choose
to do terrible, terrible things, let's say in the context
of a town, then the people of that town are
going to recognize that you're terrible, terrible person and they
(20:25):
will treat you as such. But you can still choose
to do it that way, you're not prevented from behaving
any particular way. So these are all basic elements of
Fallout that would become core components of the mythology and
the world building that would move forward and would be
carried forward in future titles, and it became the foundation
(20:47):
for all future games. It also creates some gameplay elements
that would last from iteration to iteration. So one of
those was the perk system. So again in fall Out,
you have your basic abilities, those special abilities, but then
you also have skills, like you might have lock picking
or energy weapons as a skill, so you can build
up your skills that you're better at those things than
(21:10):
other things. But the parks system was added super late
in the game to give a little more umph to
the leveling in within it. So the perks might involve
kind of interesting features, like a mutation that gives you benefits,
or that you do more damage during night hours than
you do in day hours, or you might be able
(21:31):
to find more resources when you scavenge that kind of stuff.
According to Kane, it was actually really easy to insert
this into the game, which is good because it was
introduced very late in the game's development, and it was
effectively invented by a guy named Chris Taylor in just
a day. The benefit was that the parks really gave
players more opportunities to customize their character and to customize
(21:53):
their play style. It also set a precedent for the
way these games end. In Fallout, you typically have your
main quest and a bunch of side quests that you
can elect to pursue or ignore, and as you make choices,
the game takes note of the choices you have made.
At the conclusion of the game, when you have completed
the main storyline, you get a slide show like presentation
(22:17):
that tells you how things unfold in the world because
of the decisions you made, both the good ones and
the bad ones, and this would become a hallmark of
the series, even as other elements of Fallout would change dramatically.
One other thing that became a hallmark was the presence
of Ron Perlman as one of the voice actors in
(22:39):
many of the Fallout games. He acts as the narrator
for the game. He opens the games with the emblematic phrase,
the iconic phrase war war never changes. He hasn't narrated
every single game, but most of them, and he has
been a voice actor in almost every single game as well.
The first game sold well and was praised by critics,
(23:02):
and it led to the decision to develop a sequel.
No big surprise there. Interplay, which by now was called
Interplay Entertainment, created a division within the company, so as
a studio within Interplay Entertainment, and it was called Black
Isle Studios. That internal department would take on responsibility a
developing Fallout two. Several of the people who worked on
(23:25):
that had also worked on Fallout, but technically speaking, Black
Asle Studios came into being towards the end of Fallouts development,
and fall Out one was not officially part of Black
Asle Studios work, although some of the people who would
be in Black Asle Studios did work on Fallout one.
Fallout two takes place years after the first game, and
(23:47):
the player controls the descendant of the character from Fallout one,
and the goal and Fallout two, which features similar mechanics
and graphics from the first game, is to recover a
machine called the Get G E c K, and the
Get is supposed to be able to restore irradiated environments
to their pre apocalypse status. It would become a big
(24:10):
part of Fallout three as well. The game was a
bit more absurd in tone than Fallout one and made
some fans a little uneasy that the the humor got
a little more zany in the second game. That's a
trend that's continued as well. The Focused team was able
to publish Fallout two just a year after the release
(24:32):
of the first Fallout, although again a lot of the work,
the game engine and a lot of the assets had
already been developed, so that was a big part of it.
But still was a huge effort to turn a game
around in one year, and it was bigger in scope
and included some new features as well. It wasn't like
it was just a new story built on the bones
(24:52):
of Fallout one. It was more than that. In Interplay
filed its initial public offering and also financing from a
French game company called Titus Software. In two thousand, Interplay
founder Brian Fargo would resign from the company he had
co founded after having some disagreements with Titus about the
(25:14):
direction of Interplay. Fargo would leave and go on to
found a new company in two thousand two called in
Exile Entertainment, and years later this company would produce waste
Land To the sequel that Timothy Kane had wanted to
make years earlier, and it would become its own thing,
eventually evolving it to fall Out, the the one that
(25:36):
Timothy Kane worked on Now you had in exile creating
the actual sequel waste Land To. Also, they created a
sequel to Or. They created the remaster to the Bard's
Tale series, which was nice back to fall Out, though.
The next game in the franchise came from a totally
different developer and publisher. It was a game called Fallout Tactics.
(25:57):
Brotherhood of Steel, a company micro Forte, developed it, and
another company called fourteen Degrees East published it back in
two thousand one. This was different from Fallout one and
Fallout two. Those were those sort of open world isometric
view more or less isometric really trimetric view RPGs. Fallout
(26:18):
Tactics was a tactical combat game, a little bit closer
to Xcom than Fallout, so it wasn't as much of
a role playing game. Some of the elements would become
canon and later Fallout entries, but a lot of what
happened in that game is considered non canon. In other words,
is not part of the official history of the Fallout mythology.
(26:39):
The Fallout games are not perfectly consistent. That's a nice
way of putting it. There are a lot of inconsistencies
from game to game, things that seem to contradict previously
established lore, but a lot of Fallout Tactics was just
thrown out. The game did get really good reviews, however.
It was a well does signed tactical game, but there
(27:01):
were some Fallout fans who were disappointed because it wasn't
a role playing game the way the first two in
the series were. In two thousand four, Interplay produced Fallout
Brotherhood of Steel, which, despite the similar title, is a
different game than Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel, which is confusing.
I know. This game wasn't an open world style game either.
(27:24):
It had a much more linear storyline, and you would
progress from the beginning all the way through to the end,
and you couldn't really backtrack. You couldn't go back and
revisit stuff that you had already seen. It was always
moving forward. This was the first Fallout game developed specifically
for game consoles. Both the two thousand one and two
thousand four games allowed players to control Brotherhood of Steel characters.
(27:46):
You could also play the Vault Dweller from the original
Fallout game as a character in the two thousand four game.
And I've never played the two thousand four game, but
in general it got pretty mixed to negative reviews. A
lot of people consider it the weakest game that's related
to the Fallout series, and a lot of folks just
don't pay attention to it. Now. I have a little
(28:08):
bit more to say about the Fallout franchise, but before
I get to that, let's take another quick break to
thank our sponsor. While Interplay Entertainment was at work on
Fallout Brotherhood of Steel for the game consoles, the black
Isle Studio division within Interplay was working on several titles,
(28:33):
among them what was supposed to be Fallout three. This
also gets confusing because it's the same company. You have
a division within the company working on one game, and
then you have the overall company working on another game,
both of them in the same franchise. Uh. I don't
pretend to understand the business side of all this, but
it is interesting to me. The code name for the
(28:55):
black Isle Studios Fallout three game was called Van Buren.
The player was to control a character who started off
the game in prison. Then the character would be thrust
in the middle of a conflict between the Brotherhood of
Steel faction and a relatively young New California Republic group.
(29:15):
But Interplay went bankrupt in two thousand three and black
Isle Studios shut down. Everyone on the black Isle Studios
staff was laid off. Some of the elements of Van
Buren would eventually find their way into a future Fallout game.
More on that in just a bit, But this version
of Fallout three died because the studio that was developing
(29:37):
it was no more. Interplay continued to exist, by the way,
even though it was bankrupt um, but black Isle Studios
was folded. So then we get to Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda
Softworks started back in six and it was known for
making lots of different games, including the Elder Scroll series.
(29:58):
In two thousand four, beth As announced it had secured
the licensed rights to create a single player Fallout game,
and they had secured these rights from Interplay, so they
were paying Interplay so that they could create a Fallout game. Interplay, meanwhile,
was in the middle of overseeing a Fallout based massively
multiplayer online game MMO and this was being developed by
(30:21):
another company at the time called Masthead Studios. In two
thousand and seven, Bethesda negotiated to purchase the intellectual property
of Fallout outright from Interplay for five point seven five
million dollars. Interplay was still going to be allowed to
work on this MMO, which was known as Fallout Online,
(30:43):
so the idea was Bethesda would work on the single
player game and Interplay would oversee the development of this
online multiplayer game. This remained the case until two thousand nine,
and then Bethesda Softworks announced it was going to send
the license it had granted to Interplay for the Fallout MMO,
(31:05):
and the reasoning for Bethesda's decision was that the Bethesda
claimed Interplay had failed to meet its obligations to get
proper funding together and to enter into full scale development
on time, and so according to Bethesda Softworks, Interplay was
in breach of contract. Interplay disputed these claims, and it
(31:28):
all eventually headed toward court. Eventually the two companies would
arrive at a settlement agreement, but part of that agreement
was that Interplay would officially cancel the Fallout Online project,
and so I got the AX. While all that was
unfolding in courts. Bethesda was developing its own Fallout single
(31:49):
player game in house, and it started in July two
four UH. Much of the early work was limited because
the studio was also in full production mode for the
fourth game in the Elder Scrolls franchise. The new game
that they were working on would become Fallout three, which
had a dramatically different gameplay approach than Fallout one or two.
(32:13):
Rather than that third person tri metric view of Fallout
one and Fallout to, Fallout three could be played first
person style, so from the perspective of the player, you
were in a three D world and you saw through
your character's eyes, or you could play as kind of
a sort of over the shoulder third person view if
(32:34):
you wanted to. The game was largely true to the
thematic and stylistic elements of its predecessors, despite this new
approach to presenting the world to the players, so while
while on a gameplay level it was dramatically different, it
was true to the tone and themes of the pre
(32:56):
existing Fallout games. It's also the first Fallout game I
ever played, so I have a really soft spot in
my heart for Fallout three in that game. You play
as a character who was born in a vault. Your
father has mysteriously disappeared, so you're searching for him out
in the waste Land, and it leads you on an
adventure through the post apocalyptic Washington, d C. Area. That
(33:19):
game came out in October two eight. It was another
big success, despite having some pretty weird bugs. A lot
of Bethesda Softworks games launch with some odd bugs in them.
There are numerous videos on YouTube of Bethesda Softworks games
in which things are not behaving the way they should,
(33:42):
and that's true for Fallout, it's true for Skyrim. That
doesn't mean they're bad games. It just means weird stuff
sometimes happens in them for no apparent reason. But then
Bethesda had seen that the success of Fallout three met
there really should be a sequel. However, the in house
developed first were already working on the next Elder Scrolls game,
(34:03):
which would be Skyrim, so they didn't have the resources
to dedicate to another Fallout game. But they wanted to
strike while the iron was hot, so but Thesda partnered
with another game developer company called Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian was
founded in two thousand three by several former Black Isle
Studio employees, in other words, people who had come from Interplay.
(34:28):
Some of them had worked on the previous Fallout games
like Fallout one and Fallout two, and now they were
going to work on the next Fallout game, skipping over
Fallout three. So I thought that was really interesting that
some of those people had gone on to found their
own company and they started working on an i P
that they had been involved with years and years before.
So I'm sitting and got to work on the next
(34:49):
Fallout game, and it would rely on the same game
engine as Fallout three. It had numerous tweaks to the
Fallout three source code, so it wasn't exactly the same thing,
but kind of like how Fallout two was able to
take advantage of assets that were built for fall Out one,
Fallout New Vegas, which was the next game in the series,
took advantage of the stuff that was built for Fallout three.
(35:12):
This game would incorporate some of the elements that have
been intended for Van Buren. So you remember when I
said some of those ideas that the original Interplay team
had in mind for Fallout three, they found their way
in to fall Out New Vegas, including this concept of
the new California Republic and its conflicts with the Brotherhood
of Steel. New Vegas came out in t and like
(35:37):
Fallout three, it was met with with pretty good praise,
also had some silly bugs in it. I actually really
like New Vegas a lot. Has a very different tone
in many ways than Fallout three and later fall Out
games do, but I still found it a lot of fun,
and I didn't think it was different enough to be
(35:58):
a problem, so I personally enjoy it. At E three,
Bethesda Softworks had a couple of really big announcements, and
one was that the studio had developed a Fallout themed
mobile game called Fallout Shelter, in which you play is
the overseer of a vault. You manage what goes on
inside it, you build out rooms, and you scavenge and
(36:20):
essentially it's a kind of a management SIMS style game.
A light one because it was meant for mobile platforms
and eventually came out for other platforms as well. That
was a fun E three event because they announced the
game and then they announced it's available right now. You
can go ahead and download it right now, which was
a power move to announce a game that had been
(36:40):
kept completely secret and then reveal that it was available
that day. But the bigger announcement from that E three
was for Fallout four, which was set in New England,
specifically in the Boston area, and it featured the largest
Fallout map up to that point. Now, in that game,
you would play as a character who was actually alive
(37:02):
on the day that there was global nuclear war, but
you and your spouse and your child make it into
a vault and then you get cryogenically frozen upon entering
the vault. That was the experiment of this vault was
to do experiments on cryogenic freezing, so you are effectively
(37:23):
asleep and miss out on all the fun waste land
stuff until you get thawed out, and then you go
on a quest to try and rescue your character's son
who was kidnapped while you were on ice. The most
recent title in the Fallout series aims to do what
Interplay wanted to do back in the mid two thousand's,
sort of. The most recent one is Fallout seventy six,
(37:45):
and it's an online multiplayer game. In that game, you
play as someone from a vault that opens up in
twenty one oh two, so it's just twenty five years
after the nuclear war happened, and that makes about seventy
six the earliest game in the chronology of the Fallout
series if you look at the years that the individual
(38:08):
games are set in. Bethesda made several choices that fans found,
let's say, controversial, and one of them is it's an
online game. You're always playing with other people, and other
people can be jerks, so there's a lot of concern
about griefing. Another concern is that Bethesda wanted players to
control the only humans in the game. So if you
(38:30):
see a human as you play Fallow seventy, you know
that's being controlled by another human being. But that limits
your interactions within the game itself. You can only interact
really with other players and then the occasional robot, maybe
a couple of other NBC like characters. But most of
the time you're if you're hearing anything, it's from a
prerecorded message that's on a hollow tape that you can play,
(38:54):
and that seems to be less compelling than having interactions
with computer controlled characters. Um, you're just you know, listening
to recording after recording after recording, you'll find bodies of
other people as you wander around. Some of those bodies
appear to be fairly fresh, but you won't actually find
any human characters unless they're played by other players, and
(39:16):
the drop and interaction is a sore spot for some people.
The game also features a camp building mechanic that lets
the player establish a base of operations, which is similar
to a base building mechanic that Bethesda introduced for Fall
Up four. Some players really love that aspect of the game.
Other players really hate it. They find it tedious and frustrating,
(39:38):
and to be fair, the tools for building out these
are not necessarily the most intuitive or user friendly. Follow
Up seventy six is set in the Virginia region, and
it includes several nods to local folklore, such as the
Mothman legend. That game has received mixed reviews, lots of
people complaining about the lack of a cohesive story. There's
(39:59):
some complaints about feeling like there's a huge space with
not a lot to do there, that that there doesn't
seem to be enough of a sense of purpose in
the game, and that ultimately it can be a very
frustrating or unfulfilling experience for people. I've only played a
(40:23):
little bit of it, but I can definitely see where
the criticisms are coming from. It is a very different
game than say, Fallout four, and uh, I don't hate it,
but I certainly don't find it as compelling an experience
as the single player games were, where you had a
much more focused storyline and world building effort there that
(40:47):
made it easier to inhabit the world and follow Out
seventy six. Everything is instanced, which means you can run
into the same things over and over and over again.
Um and a lot off your experience depends upon other
people who are in the game, so it is a
very different experience. That's the Fallout history up until today.
(41:08):
To get into the lore would take you could do
a whole podcast, like you could dedicate a podcast to
fall Out lore, because there's so much that's been left
in all those different games, and it gets incredibly detailed,
and then you know, you don't have to dedicate entire
episodes too inconsistencies and contradictions that have happened within the
(41:28):
course of these games coming out. I am not going
to do that. That is too much work for me.
But I wanted to dedicate an episode to a franchise
that I really enjoy, even though it is not always
met with the same critical reception throughout every entry in
the series, but it is one worth checking out if
(41:49):
you're a gamer to to see if maybe that kind
of genre appeals to you. It definitely has a very
you hate to say, very unique. It definitely has a
unique aesthetic and perspective. I don't think that it always
handles the balance between comedy and drama really well, but
(42:12):
it's still really compelling. And that's it for this episode.
If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff,
whether it's a technology, a company, person in tech, maybe
it's just a general tech topic you think it would
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(42:35):
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