Tim Cain, co-creator of the original Fallout, has revealed his involvement in the events that led to the cancellation of Fallout Van Buren, the codename for the original Fallout 3 that was in development at Interplay’s Black Isle Studios in the early 2000s.
If you need a refresher, that happened in 2002/2003, years before Bethesda bought the IP and went on to make what we eventually got with Fallout 3. Cain actually left Interplay while the game was in development, and after working on the first two Fallout games, he left Interplay to start a studio called Troika Games.
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Now, in a video on his YouTube channel (thanks, IGN), Cain reveals that in mid-2003, an unnamed Interplay vice president invited him to play the current prototype of Van Buren.
“I don’t think they can [the game] It’s done,” Kane quoted the vice president as saying about Van Buren Games during this call, “so I’m going to cancel it. But if you go through it and give me an estimate, I probably won’t cancel it.” Kane admitted that many of his colleagues at Troika advised him not to get involved, but he ultimately decided to get involved, reasoning that if he got involved, the Van Buren Games team at least had a chance of not having to go through the pain of having the game canceled.
Kane played the prototype for “about two hours” and asked the team some questions, and then the VP asked him to give an estimate of how long it would take Van Buren’s team to finish the game and release it.
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“I said, ‘I believe you can get a really great game out in 18 months,’ ” the developer recalled. “He said, ‘Well, can it be faster?’ I said, ‘Oh my god, I’ve gone on too long.’ I said, ‘Well, even if you do a death march, I don’t think you can get it done in 12 months, and the game you’re going to get out will be unbalanced and buggy and the team will be devastated. So I don’t recommend it.’ ”
Kaine said the vice president thanked him for his contribution and then “basically explained [that] “Any response longer than six months would result in him having to cancel the game, which means the response I just gave results in the game being canceled. But he would have canceled the game regardless. He doesn’t think it can be done in six months, and I’ve just confirmed that to him.”
The veteran developer cites this story at the end as just one example of how hard game development can be, especially when it comes down to money.”[Interplay was] The money is running out,” he added.[The vice president] I can’t afford a development cycle of more than six months. For me, that time frame is impossible.”
In other recent Fallout-related news, the DLC-sized New Vegas mod Fallout New Mexico has just been officially confirmed to be “on hold” after a period of silence.
