The father of the original Fallout finally explained that he forced him to leave the development of the sequel
The veteran of the creation of role -playing games Tim Kane continues his campaign to open the curtain over the history of CRPG in a series of rather informative blogs on YouTube. The day before yesterday, he struck the unexpected discovery that the original Fallout, one of the creators of which was Kane, for most of his development was a low -precision project "level b" for the publisher of InterPlay, and this video serves as a background for today’s topic: why Kane and his developers Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left the development of Fallout 2 before its release.
Let me remind you that Tim Kane is a veteran of the development of role -playing games, he worked in Interplay, Troika and Obsidian on games such as Fallout, Vampire: The Masquarade – Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity and the recent outs. While in a peninsula, he leads a vlog about various unexplored stories from his career, from the initial purpose of Fallout shelters to the modernization of his underestimated d&D-games, The Temple of Elemental Evil, in the framework of the US Department of Defense AI.
The departure of Kane, Boyarsky and Anderson from InterPlay to create his own studio of role -playing games is one of those mythical fragments of the history of role -playing games, the historical point of the support, which fans reflected on. In many ways, the first Troika game – Arcanum – is similar to an alternative Fallout 2, a diverging evolutionary path for many of the same ideas.
According to Kane, the fact that Fallout 1 was originally a low priority for InterPlay was the command of a disguised blessing for him – this led to a lack of supervision and creative freedom, about which the developers will yearn subsequently. Kane tells that he took into the team many novice developers, as well as the so -called "problem employees", who did not succeed on Interplay.
The situation began to change closer to the end of development, when employees of the InterPlay quality control department began to play Fallout, with the exception of their other responsibilities, which is why Kane had problems and the project came into view of the founder of Interplay (now the general director of Inxile) Brian Fargo. As Kane describes, Fallout gained momentum and attracted more attention to the months preceding the release, and after success with critics, Fallout 2 became a priority for Interplay.
But Kane says that at that time he did not want to make a sequel, feeling burned out after a long and exhausting work on Fallout 1, wanting to move on to something else. The assistant producer of the first game, chosen by Kaine for the post of head of Fallout 2, was not nominated for this position – the Interplay leadership informed Hatch that did not receive Kane’s written recommendation on this issue, while Kane claims that the letter was transferred and either not noticed or ignored. When the team that originally created Fallout 2 began to experience difficulties, according to Kane, Fargo asked him, Boyarsky and Anderson, to prepare a new project, which eventually formed the basis of Fallout 2.
Kane characterizes the project as a project with increased leadership intervention, citing the notorious fallout 2 tutorial as an example, "Test Test".
We were obliged to introduce him", – Kane explains. "We were told that the tutorial should be. I asked: "Can people skip it?" "No" "What about subsequent passages?" "No".
Although the cult cover of Fallout 1 was created on the Boyarsky and his assistant, Kane says that the representative of the marketing department forbade the team to repeat this decision, and at a disappointing meeting, this decision was made without any participation of Kane. When Kane complained about the intervention of other departments in the vision and process of the developer team, the CEO of Fargo proposed to dismiss the offender, to the bewilderment of Kane, who wanted creative freedom, but did not want someone to lose his job because of this. "I just wanted everything to return to what Fallout was [1]".
The developer called newly acquired attention and intervention especially unpleasant, given how little the company believed in his team in the original project. He describes the reaction as follows: "People with whom I have never communicated in my life came up and said: "We have done well on Fallout"".
Since InterPlay wanted to release Fallout 2 in October 1998 (which the remaining team ultimately achieved), the developers had another long processing period, but Kane says that the last straw was Fallout 1 and bonus payments to employees who worked on it.
Kane claims that his prize for the release of the original Fallout was significantly cut, and at the personal discretion of the general director Brian Fargo. According to Kane, Fargo repeatedly appropriated part of his bonus to an employee who, according to Kane, rudely did not work out and whose initial bonus reflected this assessment. The award was also additionally cut due to a delay in the error that destroys the preservation: Kane claims that even at the request of Fargo, he refused to give the team responsible for this, after which the general director assigned his responsibility to Kane and, accordingly, reduced his premium.
"I created intellectual property from scratch that no one believed in, except for the team", – Kane concludes, – "And then my reward for this was more processing, more responsibility that I did not want, tons of intervention from people who ignored us for the past three years, and a reduced bonus to "motivate" me? I had enough".
Soon after, Kane left the company with Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, and this trinity founded Troika Games, an ill -fated but extremely productive company to create role -playing games, and then moved to other spheres of industry. Kane and Boyarsky reunited in 2019 for The Outer Worlds, on which, according to Kane, he still works as a consultant. Speaking of Fallout 2, Kane in conclusion said:
I do not want one of you to change your mind about Fallout 2 because of this. If you like Fallout 2, play it, enjoy it! A very good group of people worked on it. I just couldn’t do it. So sometimes there is a development.