Although Tim Cain had already left Black Isle Studios by this time, the IP’s original owners still called him for advice on Fallout 3…
The Fallout series is now associated with Bethesda. But the post-apocalyptic franchise was initially born in the offices of Black Isle Studios; at the distributor’s Interplay Entertainment subsidiary. In fact, these companies developed Fallout and Fallout 2 before selling the license in 2007 to the creators of The Elder Scrolls, who went on to make Fallout 3 as we know it today. However, the brand’s creators have already tested the planned version of the third part of the series in the form of early versions. However, in the end, the project was abandoned entirely.
This is how Fallout creator Tim Cain remembers, who briefly participated in the development of the title, which never saw the light of day.
According to his latest YouTube video (via IGN – see video below), Black Isle Studios’ Fallout 3 was codenamed Van Buren and was early in production when Interplay’s VP called him to ask for his opinion on the prototype. Although it is true that the idea of the post-apocalyptic universe was invented by Cain, he left the company after the release of Fallout 2 to found his own studio.
The vice president of Interplay allegedly contacted Cain with the following words: “I don’t think they can get it done, so I’m just going to cancel it. But if you look over it and give me an estimate there’s a chance I wouldn’t cancel it.” In the video, the Fallout creator goes on to say that he was able to test Black Isle Studios’ prototype for 2 hours and asked the team some questions to come up with a final answer.
“I said, ‘I’m convinced in 18 months you could have a really good game shipped.’ And he said, ‘huh, could it be done any faster?’ said too long.’ I said, ‘well, even if you did a death march crunch I don’t think you could do it faster than 12, and then you’d be shipping something that was unbalanced and buggy, and the team would be destroyed don’t recommend that.'”
“And he said, ‘ok, thanks.’ As we walked out he explained that any answer over six months would result in him having to cancel it, meaning the answer I just gave got the game cancelled. But he was going to cancel it anyway. He thought it couldn’t be done in six months, and I just confirmed that to him.”
Financial problems at Interplay during the development of Fallout 3
In short, Cain continues his explanation that Interplay had financial problems and could not afford a development lasting more than six months. Finally, in 2003, the distributor closed the offices of Black Isle Studios. In 2004, he further pushed the Fallout brand by releasing the spin-off Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. But they did not achieve the expected result. So the team decided to sell the rights to Bethesda, and as they say, the rest is history.
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