Efforts to develop a large SF MMORPG based on Fallout began in the late 1990s. If it had been up to developer Brian Fargo, we could have been playing Fallout Online back then with Black Isle as the publisher, which later released Baldur’s Gate. However, there were difficulties and valid objections, even from Fallout’s creator, Tim Cain.
What was it like back then? Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were released in 1997 and 1998 by Interplay and Black Isle, respectively, and were major successes as SF role-playing games.
Ultima Online launched in 1997 and then Everquest in 1999. MMORPGs were in vogue.
Therefore, it seemed obvious to turn Fallout into an online MMORPG. At least, that was the idea of Interplay’s founder, the now legendary game developer Brian Fargo (62).
Ultimately, the Fallout MMO did come out, but nearly 20 years later than originally intended:
The idea of the Fallout MMORPG immediately faced a lot of resistance
What became of the idea? The then head of Black Isle Studios, Feargus Urquhart, rejected Fargo’s idea to develop a Fallout MMORPG. To him, it didn’t sound like Fallout (via pcgamer) and he simply did not trust Interplay with the undertaking of developing an MMORPG.
So, nothing came of the project at Black Isle: They continued to develop their major single-player RPGs like Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale and released Baldur’s Gate from BioWare.
Urquhart is quoted as saying (via fandom):
Although I would have liked to make a Fallout MMO, the reason for my rejection was that I believed Interplay simply did not have the resources to do it. If you want to make an MMO, it costs 100 million dollars before it’s even brought to market; you have to buy servers, you need service people, and you need game masters. That’s a huge undertaking, and on top of that, it means you have to take care of all these things, so what can you focus on then? What other games can they still develop?
But Interplay’s online department, Engage, started developing Fallout Online. To gather ideas for the project, they turned to Tim Cain, one of the creators of Fallout. He had already left Interplay but was still asked for advice.
But Cain immediately found the idea foolish.
The creator of Fallout had many objections to an MMORPG
What troubled the creator of Fallout about the MMO idea? At first, it was a very banal reason because “Fallout Online” would have been abbreviated to “FOOL,” the English word for “idiot,” Cain tells in an interview with PCGamer.
But Cain had further objections:
I said: ‘We developed a game where you traverse the wasteland alone … and you want to turn it into a game where you come out of your vault and 1,000 other people are running around in blue and yellow vault suits. You do realize that’s a completely different setting, a completely different game, and a completely different type of player, right? And they want to change it from a story-driven to a mission-driven version.’
Interplay then had the idea to make the instances smaller so that fewer players were in the world.
But Cain still had concerns: The main character, the Vault Dweller, would not feel unique anymore if there were 100 or 1,000 of him.
Financial and legal problems prevent the release of Fallout Online in the 2000s
And so they shelved it? From what is known, work on a project that would later become Fallout Online began in November 2006. However, Interplay apparently ran into financial difficulties; in 2007, Bethesda acquired the rights to the Fallout series for $5.75 million. A special rule allowed Interplay to continue working on the Fallout MMO – but they had to meet certain conditions to avoid losing the license.
Ultimately, the project was officially presented in June 2010, but by that time, Interplay was already in such severe financial trouble that the company was on the brink of dissolution. In 2011, the studio was finally prohibited from further developing the game. In 2012, the rights to the Fallout MMO ultimately passed to Bethesda.
All the concerns that the creator had, the fans of Fallout 76 then had themselves
How did it turn out? Only many years later, after Bethesda had acquired the Fallout license, an MMO based on Fallout was released: Fallout 76. It came out in 2018, and all the concerns that Cain had previously had were once again echoed by fans of the role-playing games.
With Fallout 76, Cain made peace: He says Fallout 76 came out after Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and those games laid the foundation for building new settlements, as happens in Fallout 76. Thus, the time was ripe:
Then Fallout 3 came out, and then Fallout 4 came out, and now you have an idea of the line that it follows, and Fallout 76 lies on that line. Back in Fallout 1 and 2, it was still a different vector.
It’s certainly an exciting “what if” question to imagine what would have happened if a Fallout MMORPG had launched before WoW – and with one of the most popular publishers of the time, Black Isle, backing it. How would fans have received it? Would it have been successful, or would it have been one of the many MMORPGs that quickly died? 19 dead MMORPGs that WoW has already outlived
