Fallout - Retrospective @ GOG.com

Take a journey back in time on Good old Games with author David Craddock and former Black Isle Studios members Tim Cain and Chris Taylor who are looking back at the very first Fallout.

The conception of Fallout did not occur during tense negotiations or nuclear threats, but casual dinners and brainstorming sessions. "A bunch of Interplay developers used to go out to Coco's for dinner once or twice a week," recalls fellow Fallout designer Chris Taylor, who speaks of secondhand stories relayed to him when he joined the team later on. "It was people like Tim Cain, Scott Campbell, Scott Everts, Jason Taylor, Wes Yanagi and others. They just shot the shit and talked games. Some of the earliest ideas in Fallout came out of those dinners, just random ideas that were tossed around. Some of it stuck, but most of it was forgotten."

Many ideas were modified or vetoed by the design team, but everyone agreed unanimously with one crucial inspiration: Wasteland, a computer RPG developed by Interplay for the Apple II. "We had all played Wasteland and loved that game," says Cain. "From that game, we took the ideas of non-linearity and an open world map, and we also loved that certain quests would lead you into moral dilemmas."