Brian Fargo's career as a developer stretches back to the dawn of home gaming. The founder of Interplay Entertainment, Fargo has executive produced, directed, and written dozens of games, including the original Fallout in 1997. A decade earlier though, Fargo had helped pioneer the post-apocalyptic RPG with Wasteland.
Now, after a phenomenally successful Kickstarter campaign for a sequel, Fargo talks to Wired.co.uk about gaming legacies and the changing nature of development.
**Wired.co.uk: The [original
Wasteland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWH5eSdLpwg) came out in 1988. What made this the right time to bring the game back?**
Brian Fargo: I think it's the sum of
Wasteland and Fallout together that makes it worth coming back. People certainly remember the first game -- for a lot of people it was very important. Then there was
Fallout 1 and 2. There was also a large group of people who played those two games and liked them more than the more first-person oriented games that Bethesda [have since done]. To me, it was the culmination of all those things -- people love the subject matter and wanting a certain kind of role-playing game. [#video:https://youtube.com/embed/k7QPM8xfH98]
**There were a couple of sequels planned back in 1988,
Fountain of Dreams and Meantime. What happened to them?**
Fountain of Dreams was an odd project because EA said, "We're going to keep the name and do it ourselves". We had a producer come in very late in the project, the last six months we were making Wasteland for EA. He said "This is easy; I can do better than this." They said, "Great, you go make it because we're not going to work with Interplay -- they're our competitors now!" Somehow, that got turned into Fountain of Dreams and I don't know why. I don't know if they weren't happy with the final results and they changed the name.
As for us, I didn't have the rights. I'd already had all the tools and systems in place to do something skill-based, top-down, tactical. But I couldn't do Wasteland. So we thought "Let's do something else. Let's do a time-travel sort of game." Of course, this all really hurt our brains because when you start thinking about cause and effect, and you're travelling backwards and forwards in time, your head starts exploding. We put a year to a year and a half into Meantime, and I still love the idea, but it just didn't get the momentum and we ended up killing the project. It was Fallout that became a spiritual successor and there were so many similarities.
Has success of Fallout has overshadowed the original Wasteland, and perhaps what you're trying to do with the sequel?
There's no doubt that Fallout has way overshadowed
Wasteland; it's a major franchise. The Fallout 1 and 2 fans have been wanting this kind of game for a long time.
They like the tactical nature, the reading, the rippling effect of stuff. They've been holding the torch ever since. I think, if anything, on a net sum it's enhanced it. Fallout has shown how big post-apocalyptic can be. I think it's a net positive.
There seems to have been a resurgence in that kind of thing, since X-COM a few years ago. What do you think caused that demand for these kind of games?
I think it's been the resurgence of the PC as a platform. It's been "The PC is dead! Long live the PC!" Thanks in part to Valve and Steam, it's gotten more momentum and people have re-awoken to what you can do with a PC. There are great things you can do with a mouse and a keyboard, and an experience where you're close to a monitor instead of six feet away. People have re-awoken to that and I was astounded that X-COM did as well as it did. It hit right in the heart of the kind of strategic game we release, strategically battle-wise. I think it's all part of that greater PC trend.
What have been the biggest changes in game design between the original Wasteland and today?
Well I think the biggest one is the tools. Things like Unity and what they allow us to do.
Changes in the UI, for example, do in a couple of hours [what] would have taken us three days before. The rapid iteration, both in the system perspective and adding more content - like AI, 'what if the guy says this; let's add a line for that'. It seems like everything was hard-coded back then and everything's more flexible these days. We can iterate at a speed a hundred times faster than before. That's number one.
Number two, I would say, is that the open nature of development has changed things the most. Interacting with the fans; the fact that we can put a beta out there for them to play; that we can have a bulletin board for them to weigh in on with voting. This kind of audience participation has completely changed the way I make a game, even to the point where we buy content off the Unity asset store. If we need a gas station, we buy the gas station and make it look post-apocalyptic. It takes us an hour and looks totally unique, versus having my guy spend three days modelling out a gas station. And that's another thing we can put out to audience participation. To me, it's those two things.
With so many developers using Unity and its asset store, is there are a danger of games becoming cookie cutter? You have the same elements that are tweaked and players may eventually find they're seeing the same thing.
You know, in Hollywood they have huge prop departments that all the movies use. And they have whole backlots of stuff they use over again. But you don't think "hey, every film looks the same!"
There's enough there. And we go through and change it to boot. If
[developers] just literally took an asset, cut it up and put it in the game, that could happen. In our case, we don't do that. We dirty them up, make them look post-apocalyptic, mix and match them in weird ways so you don't get a sense of that.
Were you surprised by the response to the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter?
Very pleasantly surprised! I was hopeful but I was very cautiously optimistic. I'd been trying for so long to get the game made, getting nowhere, and I knew that this was the last shot, the absolute last shot. I was really worried. My happy surprise level just went up every single day. It was one of the greatest moments in my career.
**How did you go about getting the rights for
Wasteland back?**
Here's the thing about trademarks: trademark law is set up to protect the consumer, not the rights-holder. It's also set up for entrepreneurs. It's a use-it-or-lose-it law. If a trademark does not get used over a certain period of time, you can get access to it. That's what I did, but that doesn't give you access to copyright. So, that's where I said to EA: "Look, I got the trademark. You've not done anything with this since 1988 and it's 2003 or 2004. You're never going to do anything with it, so let's work something out because I want to do something with the characters and everything." They said "sure". They were very reasonable about it.
Was this a different team of people you were talking to from the ones who stopped you working on a sequel back in the day?
The whole business had changed. I think they might have seriously considered doing a sequel in the mid-90s. Now, those big publishers have to swing for the fences. Destiny, Halo, Titanfall; they have to do big stuff or their infrastructure doesn't work. This game would have never made sense for them.
Is there going to be any continuity between the original and Wasteland 2?
A tremendous amount of continuity. Nothing makes me more upset than when I watch a movie sequel, read a book sequel or play a game sequel and think "Did they even play the first one?" Right off the bat, in the opening you've got General Vargas, who was Snake Vargas in the first game; Angela who was Angie. You're familiar with the characters. The locales are there. It's call-back city. There are even areas where, if you've played the first game and happen to remember a password and type it in, it'll still work 25 years later. We love that stuff. We are chock-full of it.
One of the funnier bits I like is that in the first game, there was something called the Paragraph Manual. We had a lot of text that couldn't fit on the floppy disk so when we ran out of space for something we'd put it in the manual. We had a story about a Martian invasion there. It was a hilarious story about the aliens coming in their Verchitin armour. It never happens in the game but we had people running around looking for the Martians. So in
[Wasteland 2], we'll reference the Martian invasion, how one guy went crazy because he never found the Verchitin armour. So anybody who played the first game but cheated and read the paragraphs out of order will get a kick out of that.
The game is still accessible for people who didn't play the first one, though?
Yeah, this is like bonus content. Even in the first conversation with Vargas, you can type in 'snake' and he'll go "Oh, people haven't called me that for years." You can talk about characters and events from the first game and he'll give you update on all those things. For the common person, they don't care about that stuff, but there are people who really care about it. We spent a lot of energy on it but we think it was the right thing to do.
You've previously said there's more words in the game than War and Peace. How do you go about crafting a story that branches and requires that much narrative and dialogue?
It's the hardest thing about the whole project. There's no algorithm to run, you've got to hand-craft it all. My poor writers, they spend so long on these wonderfully crafted scenes and we tell them "Yeah, but players could just walk up to this guy and shoot him in the head." They go "Oh no, now what?" They've got to stop that whole thing. We've got to come up with all these individual scenarios where if they disappear it's okay, but other times we want to tell the story and we want some event to happen.
I'll give you an example; in the opening of the game it tells you to go hook up the repeater units. There's one in Highpool and there's one in the Agricultural Centre. You get distress calls from both and you have to choose which to answer. If you choose one the other goes down. It's great for replay, people want to go and experiment and see what the other one's like. Then you get people who want to stand there and let them both fall. Now what? We've got to come up with a way to get the repeater units up in a different place. We've got to make it difficult. That's the kind of stuff where the writers do their best to sculpt something and we do our best to break it apart. It's difficult because there are so many alternative scenarios. You end up with like thirty percent of the game content that most gamers will never see. That's what makes it so that most of what you do feels like it matters.
So freedom, with bottleneck points for key events?
Yes. There are a few things that we want to happen. If you do certain things, you're going to fly to [the end point in] Los Angeles. Unless you take on the Rangers and they become hostile, in which case you'll never go there. There might be that funnel point, or three and you have to take at least one.
You also brought back The Bard's Tale after a few year's absence. Are there any other games you've worked on that you'd like to revive?
Well, we're doing Torment. We don't have the Planescape license but it's very in keeping with the original. I do have some other but I wouldn't name them because I actually want to do them! I wouldn't want to hurt my ability to do so by telegraphing my interest but I absolutely do have interest in some other properties.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
