Media Consumes Me does Fallout: History and Review

Media Consumes Me said:
It wasn’t until nine years later, that Interplay finally saw their “spiritual” successor to Wasteland. The game was called Fallout and was developed by newcomer Black Isle Studios.
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They make the usual mix up about Black Isle Studios, but not as bad as other people have.
Media Consumes Me said:
They went as far to make promotional materials featuring the GURPS system, but because the game was so violent the deal fell through and they instead created the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system.
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This is the first time that I have heard that the GURPS-Fallout breakup was because of the violence. Is there any truth to that?
Media Consumes Me said:
Fallout 2 also dealt with some risqué elements like prostitution and child killing.
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They make it sound like Fallout 1 didn't have that, but I will grant them that the sex and drugs were much more in your face in Fallout 2. They mention unintentional child killing, but I found that to be a rarity. All in all an adequate article with plenty of information to wet the appetites of would-be Fallout fans, but not all that special.
 
iridium_ionizer said:
This is the first time that I have heard that the GURPS-Fallout breakup was because of the violence. Is there any truth to that?
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It was the reason everyone believed for years, so no wonder they copied it without fact-checking.

The real reasons are shrouded in mystery, but Sander dug up quite a lot for our history of Fallout piece (which, AFAIK, is still the only piece of all these "history of Fallout" pieces that actually references where it gets its facts from, and hence manages to be a lot more accurate than the linked article).

In early 1997, in the midst of Fallout’s development, Steve Jackson Games and Interplay terminated their deal. Apparently, Steve Jackson Games was satisfied with everything but for the Vault Boy pictures in the character screen, and the execution scene in the introduction. (ref) As the split between Fallout and GURPS became imminent, Steve Jackson remarked “The GURPS implementation they've created is *worth* saving.” (ref) When the contract was referenced over approval rights, Interplay discovered several flaws, which in turn developed into a legal squabble over the contract itself. Eventually, the companies ended with a mutual decision to part ways. (ref) Chris Taylor, while agreeing that the split was a blow to the project, said "instead of compromising and making an inferior product -- Fallout will be produced with conviction." (ref)
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Here's the quote directly from comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg, from Chris Taylor;

Interplay and SJG had contractual problems regarding approval rights
over content.

SJG wanted to remove the PIP Boy cartoons from the character screen
and replace the execution scene in the intro movie. Interplay
(the Fallout team) felt that those two components were important
to the game.

The level of violence in the game had been previously shown to SJG
and no mention was made of it. The PIP Boy cartoons were just
darn cool and important for that Fallout style.

As happens in these matters, the Contract was referenced over who
had approval rights. When this happened, the current Interplay
lawyers discovered some basic flaws in the contract (the big issue
dealt with approval of the final game, and since approval of
content was the current problem, the lawyers got scared). The
contract had been written many years earlier by another set of
lawyers.

Attempts to renegotiate the contract, which is fairly common, failed.
Interplay had to invoke a clause in the contract to cancel.

It was never about the system. Both Interplay (Team Fallout) and
SJG were quite happy with the implementation.
 
Thanks guys for checking out the article, and thank you very much for the fact checking. All of you are the real hardcore fans of the Fallout Series, and although the article is for people new to Fallout (especially those who played Fallout 3 and never had a chance to pick up the originals) I want it to be as true to the history of the games as possible. I have already edited a few bits of the article that I wasn't able to pick out during my crazy night of finishing it up.

Brother None, your history of Fallout here at NMA is impressive, for my part 2 I will try my hardest to adhere to the facts. I hope to add all my references in the future, but right now I am one man doing everything, and it was overwhelming just finishing it and finally getting it posted (as my friend who runs the site was getting a little mad I had been working on it for a long time).

iridium_ionizer, when I first played Fallout 2 (geeze it was a decade ago) I had a few games where I had killed children in crossfire. As this was my first article (and video history and review) I hope to get better as I complete more.

Thank you again though for the comments and fact checking! If you guys have the time, I can pass Part 2 through you to make sure I don't make any mistakes next time.

Many many thanks to Onozuka Komachi for posting the article...
 
It was interesting, however, one thing i didn't like was that he didn't gave much information about Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. yes, yes i know, the game is crap and it's bad, it's an abomination and all but still, i would like to hear something other than :"I have never played it and i probably never will, let's just leave it at that".
 
SJG wanted to remove the PIP Boy cartoons from the character screen
and replace the execution scene in the intro movie. Interplay
(the Fallout team) felt that those two components were important
to the game.
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It's kinda sad, that SJG was making problems over something so banal.
 
ethanquin said:
Brother None, your history of Fallout here at NMA is impressive, for my part 2 I will try my hardest to adhere to the facts. I hope to add all my references in the future, but right now I am one man doing everything, and it was overwhelming just finishing it and finally getting it posted (as my friend who runs the site was getting a little mad I had been working on it for a long time).

Thank you again though for the comments and fact checking! If you guys have the time, I can pass Part 2 through you to make sure I don't make any mistakes next time.
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ask BN & Ausir to proofread? maybe they'll be in a good mood and do it for you. between those two, it's unlikely that some factual inaccuracies will slip through.

if they're not up for it, you can always post a draft version in general fallout discussion or something and the people of NMA will rip it to shreds in due time and correct you on any mistakes you make. :twisted:
 
I fixed some errors, adding that both fallout 1 and 2 had prostitution and child killing (can't believe i forgot about that), added some more info in the article about legal trouble with SJG, and fixed the worst mistake which I was surprised nobody here at NMA smacked me in the face with: mixing Jason Marsden up with James Marsden. If anyone finds anything else they think is not factual I would be happy to fix it.

Thanks again!
 
In 1988, hard drives were pretty rare for gaming, and for such a complex game, it needed to save information somewhere so you could continue your quests later.

Guess who wasn't a PC gamer in 1988? :o

The IBM PC-XT came out in 1982 as I recall, and the only difference between it and the original IBM PC (Xt stands for "extended technology" was the addition of a 20 megabyte hard drive. As far as I know, no PC after 1982 was sold sans hard drive. No 286 was, that's for sure, and the 286 was already becoming obsolete by 1988. As I recall, I had a custom built 40 mhz 386 in 1988. I upgraded to a 486 about 1989. For the love of God, the Pentium (which is the basis for today's PCs) came out in 1992! The author makes it sound like the 1980s were the dark ages or something lol.

What was lacking back then was good graphics and audio. The choices in 1988 were Adlib and Roland music synth cards that could do music only, and the original Sound Blaster which could do both music and digital audio. But most games didn't support digital audio until the early 1990s, because by then Sound Blaster cards were pretty much standard on all multimedia PCs.

Well, anyway, to get back on track... that always kinda annoyed me about Wasteland. And I think that's a lie about them needing to write to the original disks just to "save progress". The real reason was to make an unalterable copy of the game world in its current state, whatever that may have been. So that players didn't have the option of doing the save-load shuffle. They could continue from where they left off or they could start over from scratch. The only real save feature was the ability to write characters to disk at certain points in the game so you could retrieve them in that state later, but the rest of the game world was as you left it.

It was a design decision (and arguably a good one since abuse-of-save-games became such a common problem later. It wasn't a technology limitation.
 
Simply Charming!

Simply Charming!




Maybe some one else has mentioned this. Saw it the other day.

And.

As of 7:50 P.M. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, October 8, 2009, I still spy,

Ethan Quin said:
...the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. Every character in the game was governed by the this system, which stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charm, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. ..
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in which dialect of World English does Charm equal Charisma?

Close enough for points, I knew what you meant and it's a good memory association with other RPG attributes, but not a dead ringer for FO. :salute:






4too
 
Hate to be anal, but another error:

Meantime was cancelled because the 8-bit EGA graphics market was being crushed by games like Ultima VII featuring 256 color VGA graphics...

OK, let me start by saying there never was any "8-bit EGA graphics market". EGA was a superceded by VGA before games started supporting anything better than CGA graphics.

And, Ultima VII was hardly the first game to have VGA graphics. SVGA (super VGA) cards were quite common by the time Wasteland came out, seeing as how VGA was the graphics standard introduced along with the 386 in 1987. EGA was from 1984 and was introduced with the 286. CGA was introduced as an option on the first IBM PC.

The Wasteland/Bard's Tale games were quite primitive graphically compared to other games on the market at the time. Eye of the Beholder came out in 1989 with 256 color VGA graphics. It wasn't alone. Wolfenstein was 1988 I believe?

And lastly, let me just state for the record that most games in the 1980s that had Graphics supported multiple modes depending on the users hardware. They could run in CGA/EGA/VGA. Graphics back then were all done by vector so what mode the user's PC supported was largely irrelevant from a programming perspective. As long as the drawing routines were aware of the graphics mode the program was running in, then it didn't matter a whit. And what decent programmer would code routines that only worked in 1 mode, when it's hardly any more work to support several?

The game engine was crude, but that wasn't because of hardware limitations, it was because of development staff limitations. Those games in the 1980s were written by a couple people, not the dozens who work on today's games.
 
Nice read. What was so bad about BoS? (I've never played it but heard it was a shit stain on the Fallout franchise) :shrug:
 
LauraJay, I never played BoS (it wasn't released for the PC, was it?) but OI played Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (nice overlap in names, right?) and it was pretty mediocre as a squad combat game. If they were determined to do a squad combat game using the Fallout brand name, they should have made sure it was a good one! I used to think Fallout using the Jagged Alliance 2 game engine would be about the perfect game, for instance... they could have done something like that! Something about Tactics was just "off"... the combat didn't really feel tactical as they insisted on trying to do it realtime, and the game didn't really feel like Fallout either, despite all the Fallout tie-ins. I started getting a really bad feeling about Interplay right about then, especially combined with what Interplay people were saying on usenet about wanting to make games "more accessible" so that they could "reach more customers". Bastards got greedy and look at them now: all effed up and dead as Tony Montana would say.
 
programmer.craig said:
In 1988, hard drives were pretty rare for gaming, and for such a complex game, it needed to save information somewhere so you could continue your quests later.

Guess who wasn't a PC gamer in 1988? :o

The IBM PC-XT came out in 1982 as I recall, and the only difference between it and the original IBM PC (Xt stands for "extended technology" was the addition of a 20 megabyte hard drive. As far as I know, no PC after 1982 was sold sans hard drive. No 286 was, that's for sure, and the 286 was already becoming obsolete by 1988. As I recall, I had a custom built 40 mhz 386 in 1988. I upgraded to a 486 about 1989. For the love of God, the Pentium (which is the basis for today's PCs) came out in 1992! The author makes it sound like the 1980s were the dark ages or something lol.

What was lacking back then was good graphics and audio. The choices in 1988 were Adlib and Roland music synth cards that could do music only, and the original Sound Blaster which could do both music and digital audio. But most games didn't support digital audio until the early 1990s, because by then Sound Blaster cards were pretty much standard on all multimedia PCs.
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Umm actually he said HDD were rare FOR GAMING, and back then they were... He didn't say PCs with hard drives were rare, people just didn't use much of them for gaming. That is a fact.
 
Re: Simply Charming!

4too said:
Maybe some one else has mentioned this. Saw it the other day.

And.

As of 7:50 P.M. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, October 8, 2009, I still spy,

Ethan Quin said:
...the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. Every character in the game was governed by the this system, which stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charm, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. ..
Click to expand...

in which dialect of World English does Charm equal Charisma?

Close enough for points, I knew what you meant and it's a good memory association with other RPG attributes, but not a dead ringer for FO. :salute:

4too
Click to expand...

Good eye! I can't believe I even wrote that. Even though I proofread the article at least three times I never saw that. Already made the change and updated. Thank you!
 
programmer.craig said:
Hate to be anal, but another error:

Meantime was cancelled because the 8-bit EGA graphics market was being crushed by games like Ultima VII featuring 256 color VGA graphics...

OK, let me start by saying there never was any "8-bit EGA graphics market". EGA was a superceded by VGA before games started supporting anything better than CGA graphics.

And, Ultima VII was hardly the first game to have VGA graphics. SVGA (super VGA) cards were quite common by the time Wasteland came out, seeing as how VGA was the graphics standard introduced along with the 386 in 1987. EGA was from 1984 and was introduced with the 286. CGA was introduced as an option on the first IBM PC.

The Wasteland/Bard's Tale games were quite primitive graphically compared to other games on the market at the time. Eye of the Beholder came out in 1989 with 256 color VGA graphics. It wasn't alone. Wolfenstein was 1988 I believe?

And lastly, let me just state for the record that most games in the 1980s that had Graphics supported multiple modes depending on the users hardware. They could run in CGA/EGA/VGA. Graphics back then were all done by vector so what mode the user's PC supported was largely irrelevant from a programming perspective. As long as the drawing routines were aware of the graphics mode the program was running in, then it didn't matter a whit. And what decent programmer would code routines that only worked in 1 mode, when it's hardly any more work to support several?

The game engine was crude, but that wasn't because of hardware limitations, it was because of development staff limitations. Those games in the 1980s were written by a couple people, not the dozens who work on today's games.
Click to expand...

I agree with you on some points, but back in the 80's I had a commodore 64 and you were pretty much stuck with the graphics it could produce. I didn't get to have VGA until 1992 when I finally (maybe a little late) got a Laser 386 SX that could switch between 8 megahertz and 16 megahertz speed. I didnt know anyone with a Pentium until 1994.

Regardless, I think there was a at least a CGA/EGA market as most of the games I played leading up until 1992 were mostly that. I played the Sierra adventure games and stopping by the local computer store only remembered seeing a lot of VGA graphical games in 1991/92. I'll look into it a bit more, but thanks for the input!
 
Umm

First off, don't ever address anything to me that starts with "Umm". Ever. For one thing, it tells me you are a teenager. For another thing, it tells me you are a smartass teenager. And lastly, it tells me that you weren't even born yet in 1988 and therefore are doing what most smartass teenagers do and talking about things you have no knowledge of.

... actually he said HDD were rare FOR GAMING, and back then they were...

Makes no sense. The only floppy-only computers I ever saw in my life were the ones at schools, and nobody used those for gaming. Also, there wasn't any GAMING industry per se back then. There were people who had home computers, some of whom used them to play games as well as for other things. They cost a lot of money, and computer owners were virtually all adults... mostly techs and business professionals who used them for work. Again, you show your youth to assume the market was the same then as it is now. It wasn't. The information age hadn't happened yet. The World Wide Web hadn't even been invented yet. Broadband wasn't even a rumor.

He didn't say PCs with hard drives were rare, people just didn't use much of them for gaming. That is a fact.

That's a fact that isn't a fact. By the late 1980s the PC was far and away the most popular platform for computer games. By 1987 it became quite difficult to even FIND games made for any other platform.

And what are you trying to say, anyway? That other platforms were ,more popular? Without hard drives? And which ones would those be? :o
 
ethanquin,

I agree with you on some points, but back in the 80's I had a commodore 64 and you were pretty much stuck with the graphics it could produce.


But you were also stuck with a version of games that was made specifically for the C64. There was no such thing as cross-platform compatibility. They had to modify and recompile their code for every platform they wanted to support. And since both EGA and VGA weer specific to the IBM PC, then I took it up in relation to the IBM PC. It wouldn't make any sense for the author to have been using the term "EGA graphics" in relation to anything but a PC. That was an IBM developed graphics technology that was PC specific. And also very short-lived!

Regardless, I think there was a at least a CGA/EGA market as most of the games I played leading up until 1992 were mostly that. I played the Sierra adventure games...

They were mostly CGA games. They also could run in monochrome mode on the MGA cards. The MGA (Monochrome Graphics Adapter) shipped on the original PC in 1981, with the CGA card (Color Graphics Adapter) available as an option on that same system. Every graphics card was backwards compatible to MGA and every step in between... in other words, somebody with an EGA card could also run CGA and MGA. And somebody with a VGA card could run EGA, CGA, and MGA. So it never made any sense for a developer to choose one and only one graphics technology to support on the basis of reaching the most customers. The best way to reach the most customers was to write your code to be aware of whatever mode the user is running. It really didn't take much extra work.

...and stopping by the local computer store only remembered seeing a lot of VGA graphical games in 1991/92. I'll look into it a bit more, but thanks for the input!


Well, 1992 was a big year for PC gaming. It was also the end of the "golden age" of computer gaming, in my opinion. That's when the PC started becoming a commodity item, and when everyone had CD players and sound cards, even old grannies who only used their computers to do their taxes.

My overall point was that it wasn't "EGA graphics" that made 1980s era game not viable going into the 1990s. It was the primitive game engines that most of them used. That's my opinion as a programmer. Supporting a different graphics mode is pretty trivial, and it's not like games back then were hugely graphics intensive anyway.

My best guess about where Interplay went wrong in the early 1990s is that they took the same fatal wrong turn every other game developer made at the time... they decided the future was in interactive CD video. And were wrong.
 
ethanquinn, I just noticed you are the original author of the article? Sorry for talking past you. I didn't realize. If you were playing on a C-64 at the time then your mistakes are understandable. And since nobody was doing computer game development for any platform other than the PC by the early 1990s maybe your speculation about what caused Interplay to make the decisions it made back then is also understandable. At least you were a gamer back then, which makes you more qualified than I assumed :)
 
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