Fallout Retrospective
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Christopher Taylor
Current company: Papaya Studio
Current project: Unannounced Wii title
Current position: Senior Game Designer
Fallout background: Lead Designer and manual on Fallout, manual on Fallout 2, Senior Game Designer on Fallout Tactics
Fallout wasn't the first choice for the title. I'd guess most hardcore fans would know it was originally was going to be Vault-13. Unfortunately, as nifty keen as V13 is, it had to be changed since it didn't communicate the genre very well; in full, it was Vault-13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game, which was rather unwieldy for everyday conversation.
The team proposed a bunch of names. We settled on Armageddon for a brief time, but found out another Interplay project was going to use that, so had to switch again. Fallout was team's favorite among the remainder. The other Armageddon was canceled shortly thereafter, but since we had already announced Fallout, it was too late to change back.
During Fallout's development, there were a couple of bugs I found very amusing. One was when Tim Cain showed new door code. He clicked on a door and it opened. Another click and it closed, but a couple of pixels from its original position. Then, it kept opening and closing, always moving just a bit to the right. The door eventually marched off the screen by itself until it ran through random memory and crashed the game.
The second was the first time the rocket launcher was demonstrated. The object ID number for the rocket shell was entered incorrectly. Instead of a rocket crossing the screen, a dog popped out, ran to the target and blew up. We came *this* close to keeping Puppy Ammo, but eventually decided that Vince DeNardo, a colleague and dog lover, probably wouldn't be too happy with us.
Speaking of Vince, we liked him so much we placed his dog Sasha in the game. We tried to put her somewhere players could see but not get to, because we were afraid they'd try to kill it. We picked the Military Base... which gets nuked. Oops!
A third bug, a design one, wasn't as amusing. In the demo, I designed a manhole cover that could give a character critically failing the strength check to open it a hernia and a few points of damage. Unfortunately, the first time Brian Fargo tried was with a damaged character that died from a fatal hernia. Ouch.
