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Fallout Wasn't Inspired By Wasteland, Say Creators

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

One of the long-running myths surrounding legendary post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout is that it was made as a spiritual successor to the 1988 science-fiction RPG Wasteland. You can see the logic, as both games were developed by Interplay, and share a similar setting. Wasteland designer (and Interplay founder) Brian Fargo was also still at the company when Fallout was being made. However, this was not the case. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Fallout, we sat down with Boyarsky and Cain to discuss the creation of Fallout, who were quick to dispel the long-running myth.

Cain elaborated on the limited connection between the two series. “The natural connection that people make is that it all grew out of [Brian] Fargo’s Wasteland and when he heard we were going post-apocalyptic, he was really into us making it Wasteland 2," he said. “He couldn't get the rights to it in the end, and we said it sounded like a great idea, but it didn't direct our trajectory at all. We didn't make any changes like 'Oh, this is going to be more what Wasteland was.' We were still making our game.”

In fact, despite Wasteland being the brainchild of Interplay founder Brian Fargo, Boyarsky has never even played it. He explained, “I had a peak Pentium 486, and the game was unplayably fast due to the unbridled processing power of my machine.” Despite the final product, Fallout wasn’t always envisioned as being post-apocalyptic. Fantasy, time travel and alien invasions were all floated as ideas before a nuke-induced apocalypse was settled upon. Once that was established, Boyarsky said that the original premise was going to have Fallout be "some sort of Mad Max rip-off, but our own personalities kind of took over in a weird way."

So, while a “natural connection” was established by people, the reality is that Fallout wasn't at all influenced by Wasteland.
 

Mokus

Member
I already knew about this for about 10 years... The main creator was only advised to look at Wasteland by Brian Fargo while he was stuck with the Fallout project. Probably was PR talk from Brian Fargo to link the two games for promotional reasons.
 

K2D

Banned
Makes me feel a little better about not having played Wasteland or much of the sequels..

I recommend people try out Fallout "Et Tu" project..!
 
I still don't believe them. I once thought I came up with a hilarious joke all on my own until my friend reminded me it was from a Bo Burnham special. Probably something like that happened here.

I'll trust those guys:

So yes it was inspired.
They Create Worlds do work. Best deep-dive video games history podcast I know of.
 
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