This year marks the tenth anniversary of the release of the first Fallout; the post-apocalyptic RPG that appeared on the PC format.
Created by Tim Cain and published by Interplay, the first two games in the series (part two game out a year later, in 1998) struck a memorable chord with RPG buffs, due to its post-1950s era design and, for the time, revolutionary character system.
In spite of two spin-offs (Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel), gamers have been waiting almost ten years for the third instalment in the series, and it looked like it would never happen after Interplay went bankrupt.
Thankfully, The Elder Scrolls publisher Bethesda Softworks stepped in and bought the rights to develop Fallout 3, announcing it had commenced work on the title in 2004 and that it is using the same game engine as Oblivion. Now that it's over two years on since the annoucnement, we asked Bethesda's PR and Marketing guru Pete Hines when Bethesda would be ready to show off what it had been working on:
“Probably later this year.”
And would that be on Xbox 360 too?
“I’m not even going to hint at that, sorry,” laughed Hines. Although he did open up a little on the reason why Bethesda is so cagey about talking about it.
“It’s been in development about the same amount of time that Oblivion was – well, it will have been in development about the same amount of time that Oblivion was before we announced it – the difference is that when we started Oblivion we didn’t put out a press release saying ‘hey, we started Oblivion!’
“On Fallout, because Interplay [was a public company], we had to put out something that said we had acquired that license, but nothing had really started then,” explained Hines.
“We don’t want to say that the combat works like this, or this is what the interface will look like… we want to point and say ‘there’ [points at imaginary TV screen], that’s what it looks like and it plays like that. It’s easier for us and it’s easier for you. It’s easier to explain to someone when they can see the game being played.
“Even with Oblivion, it was the same thing – we prefer the showing rather than the telling.”
Although Hines wouldn’t be drawn on a date for the first public showing of Fallout 3, one of our insider sources let slip that it was likely to be during the new format E3 videogame tradeshow in July, if not before.
A post-apocalyptic RPG running on the same game engine as Oblivion and created by the same team? We’ve booked our ticket already.
