20 Years of Fallout @ Gamasutra

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Gamasutra looks back at 20 years of Fallout. Tim Cain and Josh Sawyer tell us what has changed from a developers perspective:

20 years of Fallout: Lessons learned shipping games in the wasteland
Perhaps war never changes, but game development sure does.

As Bethesda Softworks braces for the launch of a new Fallout game, it's worth taking a moment to look back at how the high-profile franchise got its start -- with one game developer, in a room at a California game company, coding an engine in his spare time.

"It was just me working on an engine," recalled Fallout lead Timothy Cain during his GDC 2012 postmortem of the project, which is absolutely worth going back to watch. "I just kind of wanted to make my own engine, and nobody said no. That was just kind of the way Interplay worked in the '90s."

Dig into the history of Fallout, from a developer's perspective, and you get a sense of how both the series itself and the industry it grew up in have changed since Cain first began working on the game at Interplay in 1994, just over two decades ago.

It didn't start out as Fallout, of course. During his postmortem, Cain told the story of how the game known internally as Vault13 which came to be branded Fallout at the suggestion of then-CEO of Interplay Brian Fargo after taking a build home to play.

"Fallout had a double entendre of the radiation from the bombs and then the alternative definition, which is a lingering effect or set of consequences," Fargo, now chief of Wasteland 2 developer InXile, tells Gamasutra. "Perfect for a game that stakes its rep on choice and consequence." [...]​