Brian Fargo - The Man Who Made Fallout A Reality

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It seems Brian Fargo is a busy man lately between two kickstarters, and the constant interviews. Well this time Edge-Online has a brief article about him.

One pivotal, life-changing moment of Brian Fargo’s career almost didn’t happen. Between 1994 and 1997, a motley crew of designers, creators and QA testers were working long hours for low pay on a new Interplay IP – a roleplaying game that eschewed the traditional elves and goblins in favour of a future world savaged by gun-wielding mutants and nuclear war.

Getting the game from pre-production to the shelf was an uphill struggle, with two near-cancellations and designers squabbling with marketing and executives over everything from the setting to the name. Finally, after taking an early build of this troubled-yet-promising title home for the weekend, Fargo – who founded Interplay as a programmer and game designer in 1983 – gave the game his blessing. He went to lead programmer Tim Cain and said, “You should call this Fallout.”

Fallout was a risky proposition that paid off, picking up nines and tens in reviews and spawning an equally successful sequel just a year later. But its hard-won success was more than merely a personal high point for Fargo and its designers, and Fallout became the poster child for the Interplay RPG – an expansive world in peril with plenty of backstory to uncover. “Exploration has always been the thing that motivated me in the game world,” says Fargo. “I love wondering what is around each corner, what lies inside the cave I can’t get to yet, or the meaning of a cryptic passage.”
More information.
 
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Low pay, near-cancellarions, managers and executives... Who in the end learned nothing as we know what happened with Interplay.

Luckily for devs, today Kickstarter exists.
 
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If kickstart takes over in big way Im sure the game managers and excecs will find suitable managerial jobs from local burger-shacks. Thats propably what they are best suited to anyways.
 
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