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