Fallout 3 - Interview @ Spong

Pete Hines is the interviewee in this latest Fallout 3 article from E3. Luckily, the guys from Spong are huge Fallout fans and can ask just the right questions:

SPOnG: Why use 1940’s and 50’s style music?

Pete Hines: So the set-up for Fallout is that basically the world as we know it splits off from our current timeline after World War II and diverges on a different timeline and the future that they go on is basically that whole kind of ‘Leave It To Beaver’ '50s idea of ‘tomorrow-land’ – so what they thought the future was going to be like back then, with robot-maids and rocket-cars and jetpacks and laser rifles and so on [doesn't go away]. So that 40’s and 50’s stuff doesn’t go away.

It just continues on through their history. Until the bombs fall in 2077. So it's really just a tomorrow-land version of the 50s that’s all blown to hell!

And then when you come back into this destroyed world you still have people trying to preserve their 1950s hairstyles and listening to the same music and whatnot – that’s ‘the shtick’ of it – its not the timeline that we are on now that gets blown up, its all about this completely separate alternate universe where it's all about nuclear powered this and fusion-generators and stuff.

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More information.

Hehe, what a dumb time period for a game.

Well now we know how they did it with Oblivion, used 99% fanbois to come to the pre release, all day, hands on event.
How that one honest reviewer got in and reported accuratly about most the problems before release, is just criminal.

Bioware is getting on that bandwagon, with ME.
I actually thought that interviewer was gonna jump over the desk and offer the Bioware guys sexual favors, during filming.

Wow, a snide remark in a newspost. From Dhruin? I am the shock!

That's what I was thinking. That comment looks more like a "news" post on the Codex. All this impartiality from Dhruin on Fallout 3 is starting to cause him to crack .

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Incidentally, this 2077 date that they floated around, I've also heard 200 years in the future, is this for real? According to Fallout lore the bomb itself would have dropped sometime in the 50's. Our beloved Vault 13 opened up in the 90's when the water chip wore out.

Are they confused? Is this just the date this particular vault opened up? It's not consistent.

Lucky Day said:

Incidentally, this 2077 date that they floated around, I've also heard 200 years in the future, is this for real? According to Fallout lore the bomb itself would have dropped sometime in the 50's. Our beloved Vault 13 opened up in the 90's when the water chip wore out.

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Eh? I'm unsure what you mean. Fallout's timeline goes like this:

2077: WW 3, bombs are dropped
2161: Vault Dweller leaves Vault 13
2241: Chosen One leaves Arroyo
2277: Fallout 3 PC leaves Vault 101

I did not know that. Thanks for the correction. It was from an old review that I got the idea that Vault Dweller came out in the '90's.

Yeah, sorry. I'm not a raving anti-Bethsoft - it's the press that is starting to bug me.

I guess we'll never know (unless someone here feels like mailing the dude from SPOnG to ask him) but I think there is a (good/slim/snowball in hell... who knows? ) chance that this guy was just playing "dumb" when he asked that question.
If he did his job right then he would know just about everything about FO 3 after reading several other interviews, the official forums, E3 previews and all that stuff that is out there at the moment. As a good interviewer, you should not ask questions based on your in-depth knowledge (you'd bore your readers to tears with intricate details if they don't know what the hell you are talking about at all) but you should in fact play "dumb" and ask the questions that someone totally unfamiliar with the subject might be wondering about.
Of course, it also depends a little on the kind of site. A site like RPG Watch or RPG Codex could certainly ask more detailed questions (since it's likely that the audience will be more educated) than a site like SPOnG.
Now, I can definitely see how to some casual gamer it would seem really weird that a post-apoc game has music from the 40s/50s and so maybe the guy asked that question through the eyes and ears of someone who is totally unfamiliar with the FO source material and the older games from the 90s(?). Depending on my audience that's what I would do as well and maybe I'd have asked the same question even.

Moriendor
" chance that this guy was just playing "dumb" when he asked that question."

At the very least, "feeding questions Bethseda hinted at they wanted to answer", "handjob" or "oral sex" come to mind.

I'm not sure, since I haven't read all the F3 crap, but most of these type of interviews seem to becoming from console sites.