Fallout - Dev Profile @ NMA

NMA catches up with Jesse Heinig, who contributed to the design of SPECIAL and did some scripting and other design on Fallout:

Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3(Van Buren)/Tactics ?

I was involved only in Fallout 1 for the most part. I came in partway through development, right before the game switched from GURPS to SPECIAL. At the time, the team was ramping up for the big push toward release, which was about a year off. I was brought on as a scripter, since I had some skill in programming in C and Pascal. As with the rest of the scripting team, I wound up also doing work on design, since the game was just too big and the design documents too elaborate to be maintained by one guy (especially since some of the original design docs were obsolete but hadn't been updated with early changes in the dev team). I proposed a few ideas for interface and for the SPECIAL system itself after the GURPS license deal fell through, though Chris Taylor really deserves credit for a lot of the SPECIAL design. I also lobbied hard for a couple of things that did make it into the game: one, perks that were not just combat-related, like Empathy (boy did that turn out to be a pain); two, companions who could join the Vault Dweller (since they were in the initial design doc but got cut, but I figured out a way to "fake" Ian into the game and the programmers decided to make it stick); and three, the Power Fist (since I did a lot of my testing with an Unarmed/Speech/Science character and found that Unarmed Combat just couldn't hang unless it had its own categories of weapons).
My scripting mostly handled Junktown, parts of Vault 13, random encounters, the military base, a little material in Shady Sands, and the joinable companions. I also scripted the original ZAX in the Glow, based on some early design docs.