The cross I bear—probably the heaviest burden borne by a human being in history—is that I’m doomed to annoy basically all the loudest segments of the Fallout fan community. Do I love the direction Bethesda took the series in with FO3 and FO4? Not really. Do I think the studio—and especially FO3 and 4 director Todd Howard—harbours a secret hatred in his heart for the games Bethesda didn’t make, or that he’s some Johnny-come-lately who probably doesn’t even like Fallout 1 and 2? Also no.
How do I know this? Because I feel it in my soul. Also, Howard pointed out he’s been a Fallout fan since the first game in Game Informer’s recent oral history of the series, so there’s that too. “I was at Bethesda at the time when [Fallout 1] came out. It’s my brother who actually played it first. He’s like, ‘Have you played Fallout?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t had the chance yet.’ He said, ‘You’ve gotta play it.'”
Never one to ignore a clearly marked quest objective, Howard got right on it by, ah, purloining his brother’s copy. “I actually stole his disc and never gave it back to him,” Howard recalls of his crime.
He loved it, of course. “I loved the vibe of that game,” even moreso than other games—tabletop and otherwise—that went for something similar, like Gamma World and Wasteland. “The rules of the world and the vibe of the world, they were just brilliant and so unique.”
It’s a quirk of fate that Howard can now lavish praise on Fallout’s rules for being unique. Originally, the plan for Fallout 1 was to base it on Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS. Alas, Jackson didn’t gel with the game’s ultraviolence and eventually pulled out, leading FO1’s devs to develop the SPECIAL system in its stead.
Howard had the precise opposite reaction to Jackson, and now recalls that he particularly loved “the Vault Boy and the way it would wink at the player in certain ways.” Jackson, meanwhile, disliked the juxtaposition of the breezy Vault Boy and the game’s violent content. But it was part of the first game’s potent admixture that meant Howard “played it to death.”
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