What inspired you to make it to begin with? Where does the name come from?
Fallout: Project Brazil started out as a dream I had just a few weeks after I moved back to Tucson after a failed attempt at living in LA. The studio I was working for went bankrupt, and I was forced to abandon the city or face massive debt. I got out just in time to keep my credit and not get devoured by wild hipsters on the dystopian streets of Studio City.
I had been playing with the GECK [Garden of Eden Creation Kit, the mod tools for Fallout 3] for a week or two and was inspired by a really lucent dream of digitally destroying the city that had forced me into retreat. It was a way for me to process that feeling of powerlessness before the intangible enemy of impinging economic doom. After watching Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, I named my first plugin “Project Brazil,” and the name stuck.
Years later when we were getting ready to release Part One, we polled Facebook and the followers there overwhelming voted to keep it. So it stuck.
The name was slowly integrated into the plot as the name of the pre-war conspiracy behind the major events in the story, so “Project Brazil” has relevance now that it was never initially intended to have. It still has nothing to do with the country. It has a hidden meaning to do with the Irish myth of the Island of Brasil, which is an island off the coast which can never be reached, vanishing into the mist as you sail for it – kind of like my dream of working for Black Isle Studios as a kid, since they evaporated and formed Obsidian. Still there, but forever just out of reach.
