Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout

[Music] all right okay I'm going to start the talk you guys are in the Fallout one postmortem uh I've been asked to ask you to silence your cell phones please answer the review that will get mailed to you the evaluation at the end of the talk and I'm going to stop 10 minutes early so people can ask questions uh if you want to ask a question you can just walk up to the mic on either one of the aisles uh my name is Tim Kaine uh I worked on Fallout one when it was at interplay in for three and a half years from ' 94 to '97 I was the producer the lead programmer and one of the several designers that were on the team I'm going to do a quick overview I assume everybody know is familiar with fallout Fallout began development in very early of 94 I don't exactly remember when development started because I was on actually assigned to other projects I was doing um installers critical sound Handler or critical error handlers sound code for games like ston keep in my spare time though I was working on an engine that kind of grew

into Fallout I realized in ' 94 is a long time um so to remind you guys what was going on the Chunnel opened between England and France and it was very popular a large comet hit Jupiter Jupiter was okay and Friends debuted on NBC and was very popular and Phoebe was my favorite character so Fallout shipped in October of 97 uh it took about 3 and a half years to make uh to put you in the mindset when it shipped the games on the shelves were total Annihilation to the top down RTS Quake 2 uh the sequel to Quake one uh very popular game you may have heard of it and uo had just shipped um and this is one of the first pictures that comes up if you Google youo this is Lord British being pwned by a bunch of players the team size for Fallout uh when we shipped when we started it was just me when we shipped it was about 30

people I say about 30 um it never really had a staff assignment in any official way and that's what I'll talk to you about in a few minutes one of the challenges in getting this game made the total budget was about 3 million again I don't really know it never had a budget I never did budget work um it never had really a uh development plan made for it very unusual the way Fallout was made it was not your typical interplay game uh at the time Fallout was being made interplay owned several licenses uh Star Trek and d andd and we had no license on Fallout in fact we had no design spec on Fallout it was just me working on an engine we didn't use one of the many engines available we had the uh infinity engine available to us from BioWare uh that was we were beginning work on torment um I just kind of wanted to make my own engine nobody said no that's the way thing worked at the way things worked at interplay in the '90s so I just started riding an engine there was no budget like I said said I was named

the producer but I really didn't go to producer meetings they called me a project leader that just meant that I had to write a report once a week saying what was going on but I didn't go to producer meetings I didn't write any reports and I didn't do anything but sit in my office and work on a game engine there was no staff at least at the beginning uh talk about how we staffed up um a lot of work was done over pizza at night after people were supposed to go home it was the only time I was allowed to talk to people because they were assigned to other projects and other producers were getting upset if I came by and talk to their guys about anything so what I would do is I would buy a pizza go sit in the conference room around 6:30 and if anybody wanted to come in there and talk fall out they were welcome to do so there was no plan written for this game there was no specs written it was really a seat of the pants kind of development so in this postmortem I've divided up into uh several sections if there's a takeaway I want you to have though it's that the team I worked with was absolutely amazing and I'll talk about them as I go through

the postmortem and I'm going to try to call out individual accomplishments that people did I tried to remember who worked on what feature and who thought of what cool idea that made it into the game and even a few that didn't um but it has been 18 years so I may not remember all of them and I know some people who worked on it in the audience and they're going to keep me honest the first thing I want to do because it's a common question I get asked is what influences were there on the game why did we end up making Fallout the way we did um I'll talk about books and games and movies that we we really liked I'm going to talk about challenges uh the theme of this talk was almost the game that wasn't was that was almost never made it was almost canceled twice one of which you may have heard about one of which you almost certainly didn't um it was just a very Rocky Road to get this game produced and finally I want to try to if I have time I'll talk about the Legacy some features I see in games now that were not common at all when Fallout was made so let me start with influences I broke those up into computer games paper and pencil on board

games books and movies we were a very media spongy group people every day would talk about I just saw this movie or I just read this book and we're not even talking recent ones I I have stuff going back to the 50s that people would come in and go I just found this book in a youth bookstore we've got to put a town in based on this book so the computer games XCOM and if you haven't played this game it's wonderful um we all loved the turn-based strategy strategic combat in this game the first pass of Fallout actually had a very excom type combat until we got the gerps license which I also talk about as a big challenge in making this game Crusader came out while we're making this game it was one of the first 640 480 games was incredibly sharp compared to the 320 200 games coming out it was a big influence on us and one of the reasons that Fallout was made 640480 was Crusader Wasteland of course um can't say this strongly enough Fallout is very much a spiritual successor to Wasteland

almost everybody who played the game or who worked on Fallout had played Wasteland when we started I had not played it so of course somebody gave me a copy said go home this weekend and I was addicted to it played it all the time um it's kind of hard playing it uh on a more recent computer because it if you've ever tried playing it it goes too quickly you have to put in a speed uh limiter otherwise you shoot across the screen when you try to play but this game had everything in it that we wanted to have in Fallout including um no strict morality like the ultimate games had uh we we didn't we wanted the player to be good or evil do anything he wanted go anywhere he wanted and be only really restricted by how skillful he was at playing a game and then having mentioned the ultimate series as a a game full of morality it was a big influence on our team um for me especially this is a picture of Ultima 3 it was the first Ultima game I played I had never played one or two and it just stuck in my head as this is the way an RPG um should be made and while Fallout doesn't have a

lot in common with Ultima it really guided how I thought about making an RPG uh paper and pencil games gerps um I'll talk about this later when I talk about legal challenges uh in making this game but as many of you know Fallout was based on gerps for about the second and part of third year of its development and then we lost the license or we went we stopped using the license uh however GS as a generic role playing system really influenced our game in thinking of of classless skill-based characters and no longer giving people stereotypes to play in the form of character classes whiz War um it's a great board game if you haven't played it it's a great beer and pretzel game what's fascinating about this game is every time you play it you Shuffle the board pieces together and we would play this a lot every evening while eating dinner which we did at work a lot um and we just love the fact that we could play it every night and it felt like a completely different game especially as we made additional cards and just extended the game well past what the original designer had ever

intended and of course Gamma World um for all of you who played this game especially when it first came out in 1978 it was not the most balanced RPG but it was just really fun and it had a really good spirit to it and we love the idea of uh mutations and the wide variety of things you could run into when you're playing a game as for books there were three big books that influenced us uh canical for libowitz uh excellent Hugo winning sci-fi basically about how people would cherish technology after a war occurred they were pretty much the this was part of the basis for the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout one the I'm Legend book which turned into Omega Man the Charlton hon movie um this book was how a individual would handle being the last thinking he was the last Survivor on Earth this is why in Fallout one when you're uh voted to leave the Vault we really wanted that sense of isolationism that sense sense of you're the LA you're the only person

out here in the Wasteland who's quote a normal person and we wanted you to feel like special in that way and finally there was a book and a movie called on the beach which talked about how Community would survive past a nuclear war thinking that they were the only community and uh they were very isolated and then what happens when they do get approach in this case it was a a US sub beaches near this Australian town and how those two groups interacted for movies Road Warrior that's a gimme um if you played Fallout you see the jacket is in the game the guns in the game the dogs in the game um a boy in his dog uh that wasn't the dog um this one was basically had the underground Vault uh we used to talk about how mutations didn't have to be obvious cuz in this case spoiler warning the dog's telepathic it's actually a bit smarter than Don Johnson um so we like to talk about how all the mutations wouldn't

obvious that didn't really make it into the game we we decided to make the ghouls very obvious and the super mutants very obvious but the day after uh this is an 80 miniseries that talked about how rapidly civilization would collapse even the day after a bomb Falls and that was something that's very much woven into Fallout we just assumed after the war there was no civilization left that it was every man for himself and there would actually be few vestiges of civilization that uh would survive a nuclear war Forbidden Planet uh this was especially the art director lonard bary's idea that the robots and Fallout would be based or all the technology would be based on technology that the ' 50s projected into the future so that's how Fallout got explained to people who were coming on to the team we didn't want to see Terminator style robots we wanted to see Robbie the robot style robots we wanted to see Forbidden Planet style ray guns if we did ray guns at all um and we we often went back to this movie as a visual Touchstone one though that was far more important

visually um city of Lost Children you may recognize that ocular it's the power armor ocular that's on the front cover of the Fallout box um the art staff fell in love with this movie and would play it on continuous uh tape in their uh office just everything about this movie they love the steam powered you know Tech the how everything looked like it was had large knobs and big dials and they wanted that look and Fallout and finally there's an old s film which it's a it's a film but it's made up of mostly Stills called L it's a French film which talked about how a civilization would try to recover from um a horrible disaster U possibly nuclear possibly biological um the art director especially loved the look of the technology in this uh movie and he would watch it frequently now I want to talk about the challenges in making Fallout there were a lot and I tried to put them chronologically and then I realized they really broke down into uh four big groups that are quite different and that

would be team challenges of how we structure the team as it grew and how we divide it up work um design challenges things we argued over when we were trying to make the game technical challenges which in the 9s I hope I don't bore some of you are going to be talking about just the difficulties of writing to a super VGA game and dealing with 256 colors in a time where that felt like that was an amazing amount and now we don't even have to think about such small number of pixels or such small number of colors and finally um I had a number of legal challenges that hit the game which almost prevented the game from Shipping so I'll talk to I'll point up the two times where the game was almost canceled so for the team challenges um the first one is that we had absolutely no resources for this team for the first 6 months it was just me uh sitting in a room working on an engine um I have no idea why this picture was taken I have no memory of this um I know I was stressed if you look carefully in the picture see three stress relieving objects my uh Pink stress ball uh a

miniature tequila bottle with a sombrero and um a tick action figure so this is probably just taken why I was working on bugs after 6 months I got assigned a scriptor and an artist and they were both named Jason so people refer to us as Tim and the jasons which sounds like a really awful band name um the artist I had nothing to tell him to do because we had hadn't picked a genre yet all I had was an engine um I'm also color blind so I couldn't even tell him this is the color pette I went to do I think he ended up making rocks and trees and grass for a few months almost all of which we threw out because we don't have them in fall out um sometime at the beginning of year one uh we really started to get more people uh many of these people worked during year 1 uh by coming after work and just brainstorming with us or we tried to come up with setting idea and um tried to make assets that we

could actually use in the engine I was making uh during the second year we actually boned up to almost 15 people we gained the our first lead designer Scott Campbell who I think left by the end of uh year two um and then we got the lead designer off of ston keep Chris Taylor and he took the game through to completion most of the people are in here but records photographic records of this era are spotty at best and I had to scour I have no photographs and I had to scour the net even to find this team G's photo finally in uh year three we had about 30 people this is the majority of them um there are a few people that aren't picture that primarily worked on Fallout but were actually assigned to other groups um Fallout was not under black isle at the time uh black Isle got created in about the last 8 months of of fallout's existence so Fallout was produced under interplays moniker and then Fallout 2 was done under black aisle but Fergus provided us with a lot of people right at the end to let us um

get a lot of assets done that we otherwise wouldn't have had time to make the early development of the game was really rough I actually have a video here of the original prototype um with a bunch of art stolen from other games being developed by interplay uh this prototype actually is on the Fallout one dis if you look in an extra folder you can actually play it um I don't know why I included it otherwise just to show people what the game would have turned out if it had just been me for three years we had a lot of trouble conveying the idea of this game to other people especially when we hired them um it was in the first year we didn't know what we were making uh after we did know what we're making the team expanded every year to be about double the size it was the year re before was hard to explain to those people as well as to marketing what Fallout was about we had a dark humor style that was hard to convey we had a um a sort of isolationist it wasn't it didn't seem like the game would be fun when you described it to someone it sounded so morose but when they played it they always thought it was a lot of fun and I had trouble

expressing that to people and especially Administration who at least on one occasion just wanted to cancel it because they thought it was too nebulous what we were making so Chris Taylor Made a wonderful vision statement that I'm going to include in the it's not part of the PowerPoint but I'll include it in the docs that you can download when you get the um talk later but I included like a page of it here he basically gave 15 reasons why you wanted to play this game and he started with mega violence um it goes on to there to things like um um playing the game Your Own Way um uh deciding whether you want to be good or evil and living with the consequences and that became very difficult later when we were trying to explain why you could kill children um so I'll let you read this on your own so another challenge we had with this team was we all worked very long hours because it was a very small team um most people didn't mind in fact most people just came in and worked nights and Saturdays all on their own where this became a problem was in the last

say six months of this game we had to go into crunch mode and since everybody was already working 6 day weeks we started working every day for the last year half a year it was being made people were pretty much at work every day for 12 to 14 hours a day we joke about it now when I see some of those guys but there was like 6 months where I never saw a movie or a TV show a grocery store um a lot of people just started taking their clothes to um cleaners because they weren't even home long enough to do laundry you just lived with these people uh more than they lived with their own families it was awesome because we were in our 20s and didn't know any better um I don't know if we any of us could do that now um an awesome thing I wanted to point out here though that happened was in the last 6 months The Fallout was being developed uh very a lot of the people who were in QA volunteered to come in on the weekends and work for free and this is in an environment where if you came in if you were a QA member at interplay

you could come in on the weekend and get time and a half or even double time by working on um assed projects but these people would come in and work on Fallout for free and I just wanted to point that out because I was flabbergasted that there were these guys who didn't make a lot of money and they're like nope I'd rather get all the bugs out of your game then come and work on the the game I'm assigned and I just thought that was amazing so I'm going to talk about some of the design challenges we hit and I've hit upon this one a number of times already but basically the setting for this game was very elusive at the beginning that prototype you saw gave no hint for setting so we really wanted to do a fantasy game um a lot of the people came on board said oh we can do something that's better than D and D we can do something that's you know our own twist on on fantasy I think everybody who makes an RPG wants to do that um we quickly threw that out because there were so many other Fantasy games being developed and this is the one choice we made unwittingly that actually saved us from being cancel the first time and I'll talk about that in just a second our second idea um was epic you started in the modern world

you were thrown back in time you killed the monkey that would evolve into being humans you went through space travel you went to the Future that was rolled by dinosaurs you were then exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back to the original timeline that you restored to full and came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend it's weird even hearing me talk about it now but we really were going to go with this um and I think one of the other producers kind of slapped me and said there's no way you're going to get the story line made it's not going to get approved you could work on it for years and no one will ever do it I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we had done this game and I believe Scott Campbell the designer at the time Mak to have written down somewhere I'd love to see it um to see what we thought was cool you know 18 years ago um from that though we really liked the um alien um idea that was part of the the whole space travel and we all loved XOM so we actually narrowed it

down to a storyline involving um aliens invading the planet and taking over the entire planet except one city so you go back to that city which is kind of your home base and you leave the city to go fight the aliens um this isn't what we went with but it was kind of what how I'm giving you an idea of how it morphed into Fallout the idea of the Vault that you use as your home base you went out into the Wasteland we finally one day decided we wanted to try to do Wasteland 2 so we went to post-apocalyptic and we spent the next year trying to get the Wasteland 2 license from EA um they never gave it to us but we got so enamored with the idea of making a postapocalyptic game that we couldn't stop working on it we just liked it so much that we just changed over all the uh the game post-apocalyptic and said we didn't get the wasteline license we're just you know make it our own so we finally went post post-apocalyptic and this is when the first near cancellation occurred for Fallout interplay acquired the Forgotten Realms and the the planescape D andd licenses in late

94 and at that time um Fallout came up at a producer meeting as considered for cancellation because at the time it only been in development for less than a year they thought it was a b product in fact the Dirty Little Secret interplay was they considered it a be product up until the time it shipped um they had thought once it shipped they were going to get all the people on the team and move them on to real projects like descent to under Mountain um they also thought that that Fallout was going to be way too competitive with the other games that were on the Shelf um they did not want to see their D and D games up there losing uh dollars to this side project effectively that interplay was also working on so marketing was convincing um Brian Fargo to cancel it because they it was too competitive um in the end I went into Fargo's office and I basically begged um I got down on my hands and knees and I begged him to to let us make this game um it was just a few of us I convinced him it was a tiny budget um I didn't know it would get balloon to 30 people um and I showed him the work we

had done and I'm amazed he was he Brian has a lot of positive qualities I didn't think he'd see from that prototype what we were going to end up with but he did and he ended up not canceling the game um the second uh big design challenge we had was deciding what view to do um at the time first person games were coming out and were considered super immersive um that word's been used now for a decade and a half and I'm still not sure what it means we wanted to go third person because it was more strategic to play fall uh a turn-based combat system that way um a lot of people call Fallout isometric um just to get really pedantic it's actually Cavalier oblique um you can see the the uh the tiles on the ground are not at a perfect 45° angle they're actually tilted 3060 we did that for a reason when we laid down the hex's that we're actually going to put on the game um that put the hexes in a nice pattern that made it easy to do

calculations from Mouse clicks into hex space which back then you didn't have a lot of Cycles to waste and if we rotated him at this direction you could do it with just a division by two which you could do with a shift and some addition so we ended up picking that angle for that sole reason and then the art director liked it because he thought buildings looked better at 3060 than at 45° so he bristled every time somebody said we were an isometric game so like I said they were good for rotation they're also really good for distance calculation uh you only have six rotations you pick two points on the screen it's very easy to calculate how many hex's are between them the worst thing about this was it's really bad for up and down movement because you can only go along those six directions and people went up and down they you know would wiggle back and forth we never really came up with a solution to that and we shipped with it obviously people didn't think it was that awful but the art director absolutely hated that and he wanted to go with a 12 um rotation system but then there's really no good way to make someone walk from one hex to

a hex two up so I nixed that um for anyone who played the game at first came out there was a game timer in it um the player to finish the first quest in a set timer the entire game would be fa would fail this was something that we put in to give the game a sense of urgency but it was really controversial even among the team half of us loved it half of us hated it we would argue about it we argued about it until the day it shipped and as soon as it shipped out the door uh we made a patch that actually took that out um if there's one thing I could go back in time and change it would be to remove any timed quests from Fallout I just didn't like the false sense of urgency and I also felt like the player um had this sense he had to rush through the game and Miss fun things to do because of that stupid water chip timer um a big problem we had I told you we were very much media sponges in on the team everybody wanted to put their own cultural reference stamp into the game whether it was a TV show they liked or a movie that they liked or even other games they were playing they wanted to put little inside jokes in so that

people playing the game would go oh I know what they're talking about I was worried that not only we would lose players when we had that but RPGs tend to sit on the shelf for years and I was afraid we'd look dated so I made a rule and the rule for that was if you put in a joke or cultural reference if the player didn't get it they shouldn't even know that that joke or cultural reference was being made and this uh uh image from this is one of the perks you get for unarmed it's uh if you hit someone it automatically comes a critical hit it's called The Slayer that makes perfect sense to somebody who just as saying hey that's a good name for someone who always gets Critical Hits it's actually in that way because Chris Taylor was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and wanted at least one perk in there with the name Slayer another example that probably nobody would know about cuz it's so deeply embedded was Gizmo which was one of the main characters who had uh voice over and a nice 3D generated head um he was one of the people who could who could fight for control of a place

called junktown well Gizmo is a good name for somebody running a place called Junk toown a lot of people think it's a reference to the movie Gremlins It's actually an inside joke it was the name of the skunk I owned when I was 12 years old so now you know there's a ton of references like that in Fallout but just being able to pull them out I probably don't even know most of the ones that my own team put in because like I said they buried them so deeply that unless you knew what the inside reference was you'd never know it was even being made naming Fallout was very difficult it was not named Fallout at the beginning it was actually named vault 13 um in fact the batch file for building the game always generated Vault 13. exe and even after we renamed it there was just the last line of the batch file just said copy fallout. 13. exe to fallout.exe um we really liked this name we thought it was science fictiony and um kind of mysterious but marketing didn't like it because it didn't give any sense of what the game was was about they suggested

things like aftermath and Survivor and the wonderfully generic postnuclear Adventure um which we actually put at the bottom for a while um what really happened was Brian Fargo took the game home um he's president of interplay he took it home and played it over the weekend and came back and put the uh CD on my desk and said you should call it Fallout and it was just a brilliant name it was one word we didn't think it would be abbreviated um it was it captured kind of the essence of the game and he was really good at naming games by the way so we actually uh switched the name Fallout just in probably like four or five months before the game shipped um we did most of the box covers and stuff I'll talk about that um we wanted to name the system as well because at the time people were not only naming their games but naming the system used in the game and when we lost gerps everybody felt like we needed to have a name for the system and since the system we eventually developed had these seven stats agility Charisma endurance luck intelligence perception and strength so

I said well just put them in that order and it spells a lips that'll be the name of our system that lasted a day until Jason swin one of the other designers came in and said you know you can rearrange those letters to make the word special when everybody likes that a little better so I've never forgiv forgiven him for that Diablo fun game I loved it thorn in my side because it came out in 6 and it was real time multiplayer ismetric RPG I had to go to lots of meetings with marketing and the administration they wanted Fallout to be multiplayer and real time now we've been making it for two and a half years that was not going to happen um but there were a lot of meetings and it came really close and it actually slowed down development for a while because um we had to do feasibility studies of rewriting the code to make it real time and rewriting um a adding a network layer into the game um finally uh I persevered and even

though there were severe doubts um in the marketing projections for the success with the game they let us stay with single player and uh uh turn-based so I'm going to jump into some of the technical challenges um this is a little more uh uh it hasn't aged well some of the problems I'm going to bring up people are going to go why is this even an issue flat memory um back when I started in '94 uh PC games were still made with 64k chunks so you had near and far pointers you couldn't use a lot of memory um the problem was since we chose as super VGA mode we needed more than a 64k chunk a new compiler came out watcom had flat mode I chose to use it it meant we didn't have to deal with expanded or extended memory which if you ever play old games you know you have to tweak those memory drivers to get that just right we didn't have to worry about that we also didn't have to worry about those near and far pointers anymore more the downside was all of the old code we had we just had

to rewrite or throw away so most of the code in Fallout is um was written specifically just for Fallout except for a couple pieces that I'll call out later that we grabbed from other games um mainly because we couldn't go back to the old library of interplay stuff and pull out code uh we picked super BGA which at the time was amazing 640480 256 colies I mean who could who could ever want more um my artist wanted more they actually made all of the Sprite using Alias and they made it at high resolution and they made it with 16bit color um that meant we had to take those uh all the the animations they did all the 3D models reduce them down to Sprite files in six rotations and cut out the colors reduce the colors from 16 to 256 but then they wanted color cycling so we had to take like 16 20 colors out of that so we could reserve for color cycling so we actually were down to like 230 colors um and and then there was another problem we ran into with super

VJ which is every video card that was manufactured had a different way of doing 64048 256 color um not just the video card you had to know what chipset was on the video card so if somebody said I have a trident uh card you had a trident 9600 you had to noted you have a trident 9600 chipset a chipset b or chipset C and they all Bank switched super VJ in a different fashion and you had to write the bank switch separately and detecting the cards were very difficult sometimes you just had to ask the person and when they started up the game what car do you have in your machine and people didn't know that luckily in late '94 vesa came out standardized super VGA we rewrote all of our code to that standard pretty much um is the reason probably the game runs today is because we go through the standardized interrupts I doubt if you could play the game if you had to pick an old video card off of a list of 20 and hope that it matched whatever the modern specs were uh we chose Sprites obviously oh sorry um we originally thought about doing it LLY but the test we did couldn't give us the level of detail we

wanted um but having this many Sprites though led to an incredibly large footprint and it was difficulty caching them in um to this day that's why Fallout sometimes chugs just because it has to load in a Sprite before it can display it um polygons were just starting to become popular and believe it or not we actually argued whether the industry was going to go polygonal or not um people thought no Sprites are just Sprites are just the way they're always going to do it polygons are fad um obviously that was wrong um the Talking Heads the uh when you're playing the game and you see those heads that pop up and and they're wonderfully detailed and they have voice over this was lonard borski's idea but they were pretty much implemented by another artist named Scott rodenhiser Scott would um actually form a clay head uh uh heated in a k and then he would sit there with a 3D scanner a point scanner and hit point by Point by Point by Point by point on his head for hours days at an end until he had a 3D model which looked like the one on the upper left there then we would um add the

polygons add the color and and light it that entire process on here just to go from the clay model to the one at the bottom right took about 8 weeks and then it was another two or 3 months to get all the phony matching done for all the voiceover that was done it was probably four man months per head which is why we only had I think a dozen there was no way we could put more in um we wanted the original design I think we we wanted 40 or 50 of them but after we did a couple we realized that was not going to happen uh followers were not in the original spec for the game and we had no time to code it when the idea came up that hey why don't we have these guys follow you around and help you out especially in tough areas so the scriptors um on the uh team decided they could do it all in scripting um we put in a few I think dog meet was the first one and then we added Ian we sent it to QA and QA loved it it tested really well it was one of the best features we ever had cuz people imagined that it was like this this is what it was like when they're fighting through the war the waistline with their follower well in actuality was more like

that and if you ever had Ian in your group and you let them have the uzi he would shoot it in burst mode and he didn't care where you were standing or where the other followers were standing and we never fixed that because it wasn't done in code and there was just no way to to expose the appropriate AI uh to script we literally didn't have the time to do it so that's why the AI is what it is and I'm kind of embarrassed about that um this is one of my funnest talk um technical challenges we had one day um I forget who it was at interplace somebody came and said hey we want to put the Windows 95 uh logo on the bottom of the box so people know it's Windows 95 compatible and I said sure that's not a problem cuz we tested it on every platform that was out and you know Windows 95 uh wi NT um there was some other windows we tested it on and uh it all worked fine well we failed sech because it worked on Windows NT I want to repeat that we failed certification for 95 because it worked on Windows NT

now what the certification said was it should fail gracefully on Windows NT and I remember calling Microsoft um and saying it fails so gracefully that it doesn't fail at all and they're like nope you can't do that so Chris Jones the other lead programmer he just made he just recoded the installer to fail it would detect that you were on NT and just stop in hindsight it was really good he did this because all the windows that came out all the windows platforms that came out after uh 95 were based on NT so nothing you could never play Fallout after 95 if you if we didn't make sure that hand installation still worked you could just copy all the files over by hand and they work just fine um um we wanted uh a Mac version we started with a Dos version uh then we had a Windows 95 version we wanted a Mac version and it turned out I had put all

the um the OS specific calls in one set of uh functions that I bound up into a library which meant Fallout really isn't written to run on Doss or Windows 95 it calls a library called ganal which stands for gan's not Windows and everything we go through that the Mac was literally developed in a weekend one of the Mac programmers went home rewrote the ganal library for mac and we brought it back and we had Macintosh running the next he took it home Friday we had Mac running on Monday so I hired um he was too busy to come over on the team so I hired one Mac developer and he's responsible for everything that went in to the Mac side he did the installer he made sure that the features worked the assets worked um he also did something that you probably have never heard about and I insisted upon because I'm stupid I wanted the save games to be interchangeable among all three platforms Doss Windows 95 and Ma and Mac meaning you could be sitting at Windows 95 save your game out to a floppy pull pull that floppy out walk into a Mac machine put that floppy in and load it onto Fallout Mac there or yeah and it

would run which meant he had to do all the big Indian little Indian swapping on the save game I don't know why I wanted this nobody ever used it it was in the manual nobody's ever come up to me and said I'm so happy you put in interchangeable save games and it made Tim hume's life just hell um and I've apologized to him for that let me jump quickly the legal challenges um I'll talk about one that you probably all heard of Fallout was originally based on the gerps license we got it during our second year um I was the one who really wanted it I played GS all the time I loved that system I thought it would be great to have a gerps RPG finally on the market um however probably I was at the end of the second year maybe the beginning of the third um there was problems with them not liking the level of violence in the game um we were very violent um they didn't like the art style um those um skill deck cards with the cartoons on it they hated those um and actually was just it was

literally too late to change any of these things we thought we were going to be done 6 to8 months it actually was going to be a little more than a year but we just couldn't possibly change it um so at this point I figured we were going to be cancelled uh the discussions with the with Steve Jackson games went above my pay grade so it went into closed door meetings over the administration building and the word coming out was that we were canceled and we were going to be moved to torment or send on mountain or the other d andd games being made um but what happened was GS just torn out um I was asked to rewrite the gerps combat system uh uh Chris Taylor was given about a week to redesign it and I was given a week past that to coat it and if we could do that then we would not be cancelled so I'm not exactly sure how we did it my memory of that period is very vague um I know we drank a lot of soda we were there all the time um I know we smelled bad too but we did it did in 2 weeks we redid All the combat Sy skill system and um

Chris did the entire uh fallout game that you're playing with the exception of perks were done in two weeks um music really briefly um The Ink Spots which you were hearing at the beginning um we wanted that in the game because it was a nice um 1940s 50s sounding group it was also my grandfather's favorite group and the first concert my mother attended when she was 6 years old um we went to Emi and we wanted excuse me baby I don't want to set the world on fire they wanted a ton of money for it and they would negotiate very slowly um all I remember is several months went by before we finally heard back that we weren't going to get it so we ended up just picking a new one not quite at random but really quickly off their back catalog it's called maybe and it turns out that that when you actually play the ending the starting and ending moves a Fallout actually seems to fit the tone a lot better it's if you listen to the words it's about somebody wondering if the other person's going to miss them when they're not around anymore which is perfect for

Fallout um we had trouble with ratings um I don't know why this was we were submitted for tea we never said we were tea our few specs we had were caught out our Mega levels of of Ultraviolence and blood and drugs and violence and prostitutes um they saw that of course in the and said you can't have tea and boom we got an M rating um we didn't mind that um I think marketing was worried it would reduce the uh the people who would be able to buy it this led to the child killing controversy um we allowed it we just said look we're going to have kids in the game if you shoot them it's a huge penalty to um Karma you're really disliked um there are hope there are places that won't sell to you there people shoot you on site and we thought people can decide what they want to do um there was a small problem with that and that if you ever did a burst mode with a gun you sometimes shot children inadvertently um this of course contributed to our M rating however Europe said no um they

wouldn't even sell the game if there were children in the game we didn't have time to Rite all the quests what we just did is we just deleted kids off the dis so things are there that reference children but you never see any children um if I have time I'm going to try to really briefly go over what I think are some of the legacy of Fallout some of the things that I see in other games um that we shipped in '97 um it was really seen at interplay as a big risk that paid off um this is what was constantly by people even though I don't really think it cost that much I'm not sure what the risk was that they took but that's the phrase I always heard but when I played games over the next few years I started seeing a lot of things that um Fallout had in them so I thought I wanted to look at it um we always said we wanted an open world we caught it that before the word sandbox came out I think if Fallout was made today people would say it's a Sandbox game um we we just said we don't care where people can go they can go anywhere they want if they go into some area that's too strong for them they get killed and then they learn they learn not to go in there yet

and they look forward to the challenge of being able to go back we wanted a nonlinear story so the the player could choose wherever he could go and the story would still unfold and so the onus was on us for making sure that stories could unfold that way and what we did was we said every quest in the game and all the story arcs that occurred in the game had to have multiple Solutions and the Mantra we always said was there should be a way to fight your way through it there should be a way to talk your way through it and there should be a way to sneak your way through it and sneaking wasn't just stealth it could be um sneaking up behind a or walking up behind a guard pickpocketing the key and then using that to get in through an unguarded area um in the back we always made sure that at least two of these were available in all the quests and usually all three on the main quests um because of that we came up with the idea of multiple endings so the game would actually track whenever you did something in the game we'd store off that you had done that thing and the quests and and and and short story arcs in the game would have different endings based on that and then when the game ended itself that's when we came up with the idea of hey we're going to show you slides and say because you acted this way here's what's happening to these

people that you you know have been playing this game with for 40 hours you know here's what happened to the people of junktown or Shady Sands or the Hub and some of them were pretty horrific they were like you know these people all died because you you know took their only source of water from them and we heard later that people would get these slides and then they' replay the whole game because they didn't want to see that slide they couldn't live with the idea that they' killed off an entire population I like that um we didn't like morality um like I said I loved Ultima games but I felt like they were too to they impose too much of a you will be a good person and I'm like I don't mind if people want to play badly I just want them to live with the consequences of whatever they do um this was a big thing in the game it came right out of the Wasteland Quest where you're trying to help the little boy at the very beginning the Little Orphan who's lost his dog but when you find the dog the dog is rabid and you have to kill the dog I love that Quest because it made the player feel bad and made him Wonder did he do a good thing or did he do a bad thing I love that kind of stuff in games um the perk system like I told you Chris Taylor their entire game except for perks in two weeks Brian Fargo took

the game home played it for a weekend came back and said I love it except when I go up a level skill points aren't enough for me to do so Chris said hey I have I have an idea what we could do we're throw a bunch we make a perk mesh of cool things you can add to your character based on prerequisites of what's already in your character it was really easy to code it was very um uh successful uh QA Lov that they could make characters that were different than the the guy sitting right next to them in QA and they could play the game very differently because of it um and I think Chris thought of it in a day and I implemented the next day so we literally had perks in two days two days after Fargo said there's not enough in here and he was playing it again the next weekend and he said great this is exactly what I went on a game I missed that rapidity of of iteration and game development um years later I was working on Temple velmental evil and the guys who from um watsi told me that the perks in Fallout influenced the Feats in D and D version 3 and then somebody told me later that the specs and wow were

influenced by the Feats in D andd version 3 so I'd like to think that the all just wave weaves its way through the industry and of course perks were added to Oblivion and Skyrim after the Fallout license went to Bethesda so I like to think that there's little tiny piece of of that in their Bethesda games as well um called shots uh we added those because we really like the variety they added to combat you could have one attack mode but you could see different effects on on a depending on where you shot them you might shoot their leg out and they're crippled or you shoot them and they blind them it also let us get our humor in if you check any called shot screen and Fallout there's usually one that's a little funnier I think this is the one with the you can shoot them in the utter um there's always a groin based one in robots it was called the hydraulic activator um we decided you know put the faces and vo in that really struck a cord with people they really felt more connected to the game when they could see these really detailed faces and they heard famous actor voices coming out of them they were um it was a one of the best feedbacks we got from the game and people said they wanted to see more of

it really expensive to do not just for the the CG but also getting these um actors into the studio but I think it was it was worth it and paid off um ambient music I'm a huge fan of it I didn't want um standard game music in Fallout I kind of wanted something and I think I wrote this next one wrong I didn't want something you listen to I wanted something you heard something you would play the game and miss when it wasn't there but not necessarily be humming it while you were playing and I wanted to underscore that the game was desolate and and uh um have a sad undertone to the thing again marketing wasn't sure they came in a few times and said are you sure you want this music because it's kind of depressing and I said have you played the game it's everybody's dead in the world you know it should be depressing um the development process that I think paid off really big is that vision statement that Chris wrote was really great at getting all these people on the same page um when we were talking about the game with them um we also ended up did reuse software that abstraction library was awesome it really paid off it went into about a

dozen other interplay games after Fallout Shi it was in games as diverse from Starfleet Academy to Max to uh Atomic Bomberman I mean just wildly different games all use that uh we ended up using a movie player that was written in house and was in used in a lot of uh different interplay titles as well we also we ended up pulling a script engine out of Starfleet Academy when we gave them the abstraction Library we took their script engine and then that percolated to a bunch of different games as well um the last thing I want to talk about the game we treated Fallout as an experience from the moment you saw the box which was fashioned to look like something you would find in the world of Fallout it was supposed to look like a lunchbox I'm not sure that ever came across um the manual was a survival guide that was issued to you when you were born in the vault it was things like you know when you eventually get outside how you how will you deal with radiation and viruses and giant rats um the logo this is not the interplay logo we redid it because we thought it fit the 50 style um of the game uh this got adopted and put in most of the uh

interplay games that shipped subsequent to Fallout uh the interface itself was designed to look like old found pieces of Technology from the game World our Splash screens themselves look like things you'd find this was a comic book that I don't know why someone would make a comic book about the Vault dweller being attacked but there he is even our web page um there was no um division of the company that worked on web pages so we just took it over and made our own we made it look like you know f old art um there was a guy on the team who did the level design Scott everetts for the game and then he'd turned around at night and he' put do all of our webpage design um and that's one thing I I want to tell everybody this team was amazing to work with they were incredibly talented they worked really long hours just insane hours and there weren't a lot of egos on the team um if you ever find yourself on a team like this stay with it um and we all were making the same game and I've worked on different game since then that maybe not everybody on the team was trying to make the same game everybody who worked on Fallout was making the exact same kind of game there

was no disagreements um for the most part uh maybe the timer request about what kind of game we were making and that was just an awesome experience and it's something I actually missed so if anybody has any questions that was Fallout [Applause] [Applause] one start with you so is his mic on loud yeah you the right you have go back so the question was the the ending to junktown was originally more morally

ambiguous and did we change it and in hindsight would we have done that it it was changed um and the original ending was junktown thrived under the mob boss Gizmo and did poorly under the um Sheriff Killian and QA kind of liked it I kind of like that too we were worried we LED people down the wrong path though and that hey I'm fighting really hard to make this to do the right thing and then I'm punished when the game ends so I'm not sure I'd change that but I would probably put in more indications that g if I were to change it I put in more indications that helping the seemingly bad guy would be a good thing um it was just it was too random I think that's why it got changed thank you sure okay okay uh I wanted to

child these days uh it's ah here we go okay so I wanted to uh poke at the child killing thing a little bit more because uh these days it's basically a given that if a player controlled character in any game can harm or especially kill a minor uh the ESRB treats that as an automatic adults only rating you know it's it's basically the equivalent of hardcore porn um did you guys get a lot of static and threats from the ESRB of of the era of of that scale or do do you think Fallout kind of pushed for that or you know basically I'm wondering how much sort of uh drama there was behind that choice it didn't cause much drama for the US rating um people saw it and said well that's am but I mean you have to remember there was a lot of there was a lot of violence in the game it was

just considered part of the genre um in the US we see movies like that all the time um overseas it's completely flip-flopped in America we see a lot of sex but and and violence but we don't see like nudity yeah in Europe it's the exact opposite and I don't care about frontal nudity but you know the level of violence just I would say it disappoints them that our movies tend to be childish like that yes I think it fit Fallout I thought it would be okay to have it in um in Europe unfortunately I don't remember the name of it but there had been a shooting or something happened in Europe right before Fallout was rated um I don't remember what the tragedy was but that pretty much made the entire ratings board there just go we won't even consider it it wasn't dramatic it was like you won't you won't have this game or we're rate it um whatever that rating is that you have to go into the store and ask for them to pull it out from under the shelf and a brown paper bag um we didn't want that so we just we just took the kids out

okay yeah I'd like to ask about the team's approach to player choice and just uh was there any systematic design to it or just kind of ad hoc um the closest we got to a system was for every main story Quest if you had to go through that quest to get to the end of the game um we would play through it and I I played the game from start to finish 5 times and then a ton of um uh not quite playthroughs besides that and everybody on the te team did that and if they ever found a main story Quest that they couldn't finish because they made a character that was so extreme that they couldn't fight talk or sneak their way past we would go and take one of those three methods and make it much easier I mean sometimes it was as easy as you know the person who had the key uh who was standing by the the front gate and there was a a locked door in the back of the building had a perception of one I mean he would never ever see you steal no matter how bad your pickpocketing was um on the side quest however I usually

let people relax it if there's only one or two ways through and if they were kind of difficult that was okay because side quest didn't have to be done and that was as close as we got but like I said we we worked together so closely that we all had almost the same mindset of how to put together a quest that there were never really a lot of arguments over that um that just kind of flowed out so hi um did you have a working name for I guess what we later became the Vault boy the became embraced by the public as the mascot for Fallout did you get that character was that created just sort of on a whim at like the last minute or was there a lot of iteration during the development of that and did you realize at the time that that was just going to kind of personify your game and later become like a mascot a symbol of it are you talking about the the one on the perk yeah the little cartoon guy with a 13 who's always people sometimes call the pit boy Fallout Boy and I'm like no that's not him that's the guy with the yellow and red cape on the pit boy um when I first saw the drawings that uh the lead artist had done I was a little surprised cuz

they reminded me of Monopoly cards but they really did fit the game really well they had a great sense of humor especially when you read like here was a card saying you know you can viciously kill someone with a backstab and then there's this funny cartoon of someone slicing someone in two from behind and it had that Fallout cheekiness of look everything's got to be okay you know the the things we had in the in the vault literature of yeah the world's been destroyed but we're okay and here's how you cook rats to make delicious meals it just had that Vibe of we're not taking this very seriously and you should be happy so I think it kind of spread the team itself had absolutely no problem with it we were a little surprised when when Steve Jackson games didn't think it fit the the the game because I thought it was it was wonderful we didn't know how much it would take off though so so you just mentioned uh fallout cheekiness and I think that dark humor which you also touched on is one of the things that I and a lot of other people love about the game uh can you talk a little bit about the writing process of sort of creating those jokes and also

the process of communicating that that sort of ineffable sense of humor to a team of people some of whom understand it better than others well I think um the original designer on the game um Scott Campbell he kind of laid out all the different areas in the game and so later on when people went through and wrote up the dialogues and a lot of the dialogues by the way weren't written by designers um some of them were but we had such a big diverse group that when the artists would finish doing their art and it would have to it would take a long time for it to get processed they'd sit there and they write dialogues um and remember they were watching all these dark movies and everybody was on the same page so when somebody would write something often you'd hear I'd hear people laughing next door and i' go over and they were just looking at scripts dialogue scripts and laughing there was some editing that went through it um the reason I can't speak more about it is I'm really bad at writing dialogue that's what I learned that's why I don't do it anymore um so I'm not exactly sure what the process was but because everybody was so close I don't think that they had a formal process

they just shared a lot with each other and people were willing to change things if they wrote if they wrote a dialogue and people didn't get it or didn't like it they just rewrite it hey I don't have actually a real question I just want to tell you thank you and uh probably my best moment um my best memory of video game is in Fallout 2 when I get back in time touch a computer and I think I just broke the water chip it's an awesome moment so thanks a lot you're welcome [Music] one more we only have time for one more question so uh my question was uh in Fallout 2 the quests were a little more robust they were a little harder to break and I wondered whether that was simply production changes you know better testing or whether that was a difference in tool chain well I actually left interplay before Fallout to an out but I do know that it's pretty much was the same engine um actually the car was working I think before I left so it was really that you had a group of people and they'd all use those tools for years

so it was very easy to go back and make a whole bunch of new content with tools that weren't being weren't evolving and weren't and had a lot of the major bugs taken out of them so I think Fallout 2 was just a lot faster to make and also there was some new influx of people who had really cool ideas for things that could be done with the engine that we didn't see maybe necessarily because we were so close to it so it had that great mix of established tools with people know how to use them and some new people who were just they got the humor and they got everything spot on and I think that's why Fallout 2 actually um scored higher on its uh review ratings in Fallout one so thank you [Applause] [Music]