Chris Avellone says Obsidian never sent the Fallout New Vegas source code to Bethesda, putting into question a faithful remake

Chris Avellone, a senior writer and later Chief Creative Officer at Obsidian, went on TKS-Mantis’ channel and did a 3-hour-long conversation with the YouTuber. The interview largely went into context on his career, games, inspiration, and other bits and pieces through the conversation. Towards the end of the talk, Chris does reveal some interesting information about a hypothetical situation regarding the Fallout New Vegas remaster hype. And by the sounds of things, Bethesda don’t have the source code, and he’s not sure they have the capabilities to reverse engineer it.

The news comes around 3 hours and 2 minutes, timestamped below.

Bethesda doesn’t have the New Vegas source code – allegedly

“The very last milestone for New Vegas was ‘Please deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build and we’ll pay you like $10,000 for that milestone’,” said Avellone.

“Now, what that milestone really meant was that if all those assets were given to Bethesda that means they can recreate the game at any time. So, for reasons unknown to me, but I have suspicions, Fergus decided not to cash out that milestone, and did not deliver it.”

The two then have a back and forth about the business decision, cheating out of money, and the process feeling a little strange. TKS then asks if Bethesda do not have the source code, and then Avellone responds:

“So they may have aspects of the source code, but everyone that I’ve talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it.“

Back and forth conversation continues, with Avellone revealing an Obsidian engineer named John Burke worked for Bethesda at a time that might have been able to figure it out. But it seems like it’s not the case. 

Avellone even goes on to say there’s some context that, despite Microsoft owning both Obsidian and Bethesda, does not necessarily mean that they are passing the source code over with Xbox telling them to do so. In fact, Avellone believes there might be some rules to do with Bethesda having creative control over most of their titles away from other factions making demands. Which could have implications for recreating New Vegas, via the source code or otherwise.

What could happen if there is a New Vegas remaster in the works

This is a problem that Classic WoW emulation had prior to the 2019 Classic WoW relaunch. Private server communities were often trying to recreate old Vanilla, lost to time, by roughly estimating health values of mobs, bosses, and stat pieces via old archived media on the internet. It meant that certain mobs were easier or harder than they were back in the day. It was only until Blizzard being able to retrieve some old code from archived hard drives that the true values were finally extracted and placed into 2019 Classic WoW’s relaunch.

This could very much be the case if Bethesda, itself or otherwise, could find from trying to rebuild Fallout New Vegas as a remake or remaster. You can still play NV and see the values more or less fine, but it’s those code blocks, functions, and scripts that interact in certain ways that make the code unique from the original. If you cannot find the source code, then you might see very small, subtle, but overall sort of impactful differences between how the old New Vegas and a hypothetical remake of New Vegas would play comparatively.

Lord knows New Vegas needs a remaster or remake, as the game is getting nigh unplayable with the advancements in operating systems.

So either it’s a semi-realistic rebuild of New Vegas, or they could take the source code and modernize it.

Though given that Bethesda is deep into recently working on Starfield content, and Elder Scrolls 6 still needs to actually be completed, a remaster still seems like a long time away. And now Chris has made it seem like it could be even further away. That also comes with Zenimax having its MMO cancelled to apparently fund Fallout 5, too, from last year’s big Xbox cancellations.

The evidence keeps on stacking that this Fallout New Vegas remaster could well indeed be a piper dream, even if we’ve had a few teasers here and there. We had one to do with Fallout product listings on Steam, then of course, Hoard like his shadow drops. So, we’ll never really know. Maybe the Avellone interview helps quieten expectations for an even bigger shadow drop. Who knows anymore?