RPG expert Josh Sawyer is the director behind Fallout: New Vegas, often considered the best Fallout game. But long before he brought Obisidan’s take on the post-apocalypse to life, he thought he’d blown his one and only chance to make a Fallout game.
In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Sawyer discussed his time at the original developers of Fallout, Black Isle Studios. Black Isle was hugely successful in the 1990s, creating some of the best CRPGs of all time, including Baldur’s Gate 3’s D&D precursors, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment.
After years of financial difficulties, however, Black Isle closed in December 2003. With it went the plans for the original Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 3, and what would have been Fallout 3 – a game that Sawyer had been project lead on. As with the first two games, this version of Fallout 3 would have been an isometric RPG, rather than the first-person take on the game that Bethesda opted for. But when Black Isle closed, all of its employees lost their jobs.
The studio’s owner, Interplay, was still reeling, and Sawyer eventually resigned from the company. In doing so, he seemed to have lost his “dream” of making a Fallout: “losing that hurt.”
That project, which was known internally as Van Buren, is unlikely to ever see the light of day. Sawyer would go on to attempt to make a Fallout TTRPG that eventually found its way into the Fallout TV show and finally to direct Fallout: New Vegas. After that, he helped create Pillars of Eternity, but even that wasn’t an entirely happy ending, time pressure forcing Sawyer to make far more extreme demands of his staff than he was happy with. At least for his attempts to work on Fallout, however, the third time did prove to be the charm.
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