Chris Avellone Interview at No Mutants Allowed

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No Mutants Allowed has posted a Fallout Developer's Profile featuring Obsidian's Chris Avellone, the legendary designer of Planescape: Torment and other AD&D RPGs back in Black Isle Studios at Interplay. Here's a piece of the conversation:

Tell us a little about yourself, what have you accomplished in life?

This is an unusual question, Odin, and I feel that perhaps you are being disingenuous, but I forgive you. I hope this isn’t the question you ask ALL Fallout developers on the first interview, but I suspect you do.

The short answer is this: I am Chris Avellone, I am 33, I love girls from Norway, I design computer games, I am one of the founders and co-owners of Obsidian Entertainment, who recently turned out Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords in thirteen months, and I have the scars to prove it. The happiest moments of my game design life were on Planescape: Torment, though Fallout 2 was a close second.

Now the long answer follows. If you really don’t give a **** and would rather hear what was planned for Fallout 3, skip ahead to question 5. To be honest, I don’t have much respect for questions one through four, since they’re designed as filler before you get to the stuff that No Mutants Allowed would seriously care about. I will cue the significant events that lead up to my peripheral involvement with Fallout.

I was born. Cue trumpets. Suffice to say, birth is a messy process, just ask Feargus, who’s got two kids to his name now. Christ - keep your pants on, man.

At age nine, I was playing an exciting game of throw-the-baseball-to-your-friend-he-catches-it-throws-it-back-to-you with a local neighbour, Michael, when he told me about D&D and described to me how it worked. It was the weirdest thing I had ever heard – it was like a game of pretend… with rules. But it sounded cool and there were lots of pictures in the rule books with chicks with huge boobs (thanks, Bill Willingham, Erol Otus, and whoever that artist was who drew that fighter chick “Morgan” with the nipples). This taught me that sex sells, especially if you put it in context of a dungeon filled with goblins, spiders, and orcs.

Read the whole thing at No Mutants Allowed.

[ March 21, 2005, 19:44: Message edited by: chevalier ]