I was fascinated by computers even though there wasn't much in terms of games. You just had a dumb terminal talking to a mainframe. People talk about the cloud now, but everything was in "the cloud" back then. When I was in junior high school, they had a mainframe computer. Interplay’s culture was a siren’s song answered by developers who, like Fargo, were eager to make their mark.īRIAN FARGO Anyone who wasn’t writing code or pushing pixels could be found holed up in an office or in an open area playing a board game. Fargo created a workplace that blurred the line between office and home. By Gamers, For Gamersīrian Fargo founded Interplay Productions on the foundation of a simple yet powerful creed: That the people he hired should be as passionate about making games as they were about playing them.īackground, experience, accolades-none of those mattered in Interplay’s early, most humble days. What follows is an oral history straight from the mouths of several of the pioneers who entered a veritable wasteland of computer RPG (CRPG) development and made that fallow ground fertile once again. That makes the Fallout games distant relations of the Infinity Engine RPGs, and worthy of closer examination. Many developers who worked on Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Pillars of Eternity had worked on Fallout and Fallout 2 first, bringing what they learned to bear on those later projects. Technically, Fallout and its sequel do not belong in that lineage, but the post-apocalyptic franchise’s influence on Baldur’s Gate and its ilk is inarguable. In March 2015, Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity as a love letter to the lineage of Infinity Engine roleplaying games of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Neither do the fundamentals of game development. We're incredibly proud of what Shacknews Long Reads bring to games journalism, and hope you enjoy this feature and many more. You can read Shacknews Long Reads for free right here at Shacknews, download them as epubs by subscribing to Shacknews Mercury for as little as $1 per month, or-in a limited exclusive-purchase StoryBundle's Fall Ball Game bundle, which includes Beneath a Starless Sky and eight more DRM-free ebooks about game development and culture.
Author's Note: This full-length excerpt comes from Beneath a Starless Sky, a Shacknews Long Read that explores the making of Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity franchise and classic RPGs such as Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 1 and 2.
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