Fallout Developer Profile - Feargus Urquhart
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Q: Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3 (Van Buren)/Tactics ?
A: I was put in charge of the TSR division at Interplay in early 1996 which included the Fallout 1 project. Other than helping Tim Cain ramp up the team in 1996, I didn't work a whole lot on the project that year. There were a lot of other fires to put out at the time. In 1997, I started to work on the project a lot more and by May-ish, I was working on the project about 100 hours a week. Other than managing a lot of the QA (playtesting) process, I also straightened up the Hub, made the Boneyard work and designed a number of small things in the game. I also spent a lot of time trying to get the economy to work and re-designed the buy/sell equation. It didn't end up perfect, but it was a lot better than it was a few days before we shipped the game.
For Fallout 2, I ended up being the co-Lead Designer with Matt Norton and the Co-Producer with Eric DeMilt. I worked for about nine months at about 100 hours a week to help get the game done. One of the key things that I designed was the new Companion Control system (the settings you had to define how they acted in combat) including how all the companions could level up. I also designed a couple of the areas, but Chris Avellone was good enough to touch up those areas by completely re-designing them.
The Fallout 3 story is a little stranger. I guess my role on Fallout 3 was to have it launched in early 1999 and then to cancel the development a few months later to put the team on Icewind Dale 1. My next part in the saga was to make one of the requirements of the FR6/Jefferson engine to be that it could be used fairly easily to make Fallout 3. In fact, I had a few of Black Isle's artists (Aaron Brown, Aaron Meyers and Dennis Presnell) do a test in 2001 or 2002 to see what Fallout would look like in the FR6 engine. Incidentally, they all now work here at Obsidian.
