In case the title is confusing, I’ll explain. What is sometimes referred to as the ‘real’ Fallout 3 is a canceled project from many moons ago called Fallout: Van Buren, which Interplay was working on before the studio was forced to shut down. It would have predated Bethesda’s acquisition of the Fallout label and the eventual release of their version of Fallout 3.
Van Buren was kicked into gear around 2003, but within months, things turned awry, folks were leaving Interplay and Black Isle (the development studio), and by the end of the year, Van Buren was slashed. But in a recent interview, it was revealed that the reason it was canceled was effectively that nobody important enough had seen the fruits of Black Isle’s labor.
Fallout: Van Buren Might Have Worked
Whether or not Fallout: Van Buren would have ever surfaced remains to be seen, because Black Isle Studios was shut down shortly after the game was cancelled, and Interplay, the publisher, basically ceased to function months later. But the fact still stands that, if it were fully developed, it would have become Fallout 3, and Bethesda might never have acquired the IP from Interplay in 2007.
In a recent interview, Josh Sawyer, who is now the Studio Design Director at Obsidian but once worked as the lead system designer at Black Isle, alongside the likes of Chris Avellone, explored this topic.
He spoke about the fall of Black Isle and Interplay, explaining how many employees departed the companies to work at other studios, mostly Obsidian, which had just been founded. Fallout was Sawyer’s ‘dream game’, and he landed Fallout 3 with immense excitement to get it out the door, but it wasn’t to be.
Towards the end of the segment, Sawyer mentioned that, after he’d left, he learned that Tom French, Van Buren’s producer, tried to get eyes on the demo they’d made for the game, but it didn’t pan out as they’d hoped:
Tom French, the producer, finally showed it to the Interplay people who remained, and what he told me is they said, ‘Well, if we had known you had made this, maybe we wouldn’t have canceled it.’
He then explained that the Black Isle team had asked repeatedly for Interplay to see what they were working on and to examine their budgets, schedules, and efforts, but to no avail. He said they invited Interplay, which was housed a floor beneath Black Isle, ‘over and over again’, but they just didn’t care.
That was ultimately one of the driving reasons behind Sawyer’s departure from Black Isle.
Later, he went on to work on Fallout: New Vegas, considered by some to be the best Fallout game ever made. When the project was taking shape, Sawyer had no idea it was in production, or that it had even been pitched. Eventually, he became the game’s director.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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