Interplay announced they are working on a massively multiplayer version of Fallout. Aware that the company was deep in debt to a wide array of business partners, Fallout's fanbase despaired further. Would a half-assed MMOG further disenchant RPG players who had already endured Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel? Had the apocalypse finally turned grim - for good? Apparently not.
Thankfully, those missteps around the turn of the century didn't kill Fallout for good. Roughly six months after Black Isle closed, hope arrived from the East, in the form of RPG juggernaut, Bethesda Softworks. In July of 2004, the makers of the best-selling Elder Scrolls series announced they had licensed the IP from Interplay to create a third sequel to the original game. While fans still hope to see the inside of the Vaults again, Bethesda has had little to say about the game since the original announcement, working in silence, polishing Oblivion, and quietly moving on to perfect their own vision of Fallout's wasteland.
Apocalypse When?
As the games themselves have proven, there's always some reason to hope. Early last month, Bethesda Softworks surprised fans by purchasing the Fallout IP from Interplay outright. Even more gratifying, the sale came with stipulations: The Fallout MMOG is still under development, but now Interplay is the one licensing from Bethesda. Bethesda has also set up a number of specific guidelines and goalposts Interplay must meet, insuring that Fallout's one-time caretakers now have to live up to the new sheriff's standards. To ensure they get to keep the license, Interplay must begin development within the next 23 months, and the game has to launch sometime around 2010.
Announcements in the past few months have been sparse. Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard declined to comment on the game for this article. Just the same, there is a lot to look forward to. With Oblivion now available in stores and a public declaration that no further expansions will be forthcoming, Bethesda is free to devote all of its efforts to the Fallout franchise.
A teaser video is scheduled to become available on June 5. It's likely to show, for the first time, the nuke-scarred ruins of the east coast; the concept art on the official Fallout 3 site shows the remains of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and the remains of a D.C. area naval yard, which makes sense. Bethesda is based in ... Bethesda, and most writers (and game-makers), after all, tend to work from what they know. If you liked playing in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the American West, in other words, chances are you'll love shooting rad scorpions on the White House lawn.
We also know Bethesda will be continuing the tradition of strong voice actors for the game. Though it's unknown at this time if series staple Ron Perlman will be providing any voiceovers ("War never changes ..."), the Academy Award-winning actor Liam Neeson will play a prominent role in the game as the protagonist's father. As opposed to Patrick Stewart's vaunted but brief appearance in Oblivion, Neeson is reportedly going to help to establish the game's unique tone throughout. And as the series' first two installments proved, tone is everything.
Fallout not only set the trend for the post-apocalyptic gaming genre, it practically is the genre. Just last month, Game Informer interviewed Brian Fargo, the former head of Black Isle Studios. Speaking fondly all these years later, he said, "There was really nothing else like it at the time. It was something unique." Judging from the chatter on message boards, the posts on blogs and the comments on news sites, there still isn't anything else like it today. Not yet, anyway ...
Michael "Zonk" Zenke is Editor of Slashdot Games, a subsite of the technology community Slashdot.org. He comments regularly on massive games at the sites MMOG Nation and GameSetWatch. He lives in Madison, WI (the best city in the world) with his wife Katharine. Michael is not a game journalist.
