Interplay put all their eggs in one basket with the last 2D Fallout, and the interesting thing is that the developers had no idea how much trouble the company was in!

On more than one occasion in the 1990s, Interplay was behind RPGs, but the company was in much the same boat as Looking Glass Studios: constantly in financial trouble while still tied to bigger games. Ed Orman, the lead designer on Fallout, told PCGamer that the instability around Interplay also affected Micro Forté (the studio he worked at); Icewind Dale (the “something else” Orman was referring to) was also in development at the time (1999-2001), and the studio was under increasing pressure:

“I had no idea what was going on at Interplay at the time. I remember thinking it was strange that we didn’t talk to more people who had worked on the original Fallouts. But I think they were busy working on something else. We did get to talk to Chris Avellone a little bit. It was towards the end where it became more apparent that there was a whole bunch of other pressure going on from the Interplay side. I think that insulated us a little bit from what was going on at Interplay.

I’m sure we weren’t told anything about Interplay’s financial problems or anything like that, that they needed to get this game out to make some money. We just knew that we could not slip. So that was the real pressure. That was the crunch time. That was the sleepless nights and the stupid overwork that the game industry tolerated at the time, and I tolerated at the time,” Orman said.

There’s nothing worse than trying to work on a tight deadline as a kind of last resort. Square (not Square Enix – we are talking about the mid-1980s, not the mid-2000s) was one of those companies, because the studio was no longer in a very good financial position. But then Final Fantasy was born, and everything changed…

Source: PCGamer