IbizaPocholo
NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Fallout Wasn't Inspired By Wasteland, Say Creators
It's a common misconception among fans of the series.
www.dualshockers.com
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.
