An old Ink Spots postcard

Vault-Tec 18,000 BC?

The Fallout box

An old GIF of the Fallout box, I found it on the archived Wasteland Ranger HQ-Grid. Maybe it was issued by Interplay for vendors and fan sites.

Las Vegas, untouched by the war

It has always amused me when Fallout fanbois diss Wasteland and try to downplay its importance for the Fallout series, though there are statements by the developers that they’d much rather have made Wasteland 2, just didn’t have the rights for it. There are many bigger and smaller references to Wasteland in the Fallout games, from similar storylines to tidbits of the universe.

In this context it’s interesting that the currently latest Fallout game, Fallout: New Vegas, is set in an intact Las Vegas, not destroyed by the war, with inhabitants that have suffered few mutations. This was part of the Wasteland storyline. Though you couldn’t tell from the graphics of course, Las Vegas had not been touched by the bombs, it was just patrolled by robots who shot everyone on sight.

This is the closest a Fallout game has ever come to accepting a story element of Wasteland as canon.

How GURPS would have been implemented in Fallout

An excerpt from the FAQ on the first official Fallout website 1996:

How come Interplay is making a GURPS game?
Because we play GURPS. We play it, and we like it. So we licensed GURPS from Steve Jackson Games, and intend to use the GURPS rules to make a game engine for superior role-playing games. Fallout will be the first game using this engine.

What editions and sourcebooks is Interplay using for Fallout?
The core rules are using the GURPS Basic Set, 3rd Edition Revised. Useful sourcebooks have been: GURPS Space, High Tech, Ultra Tech and Robots.

How true to the real GURPS will Fallout be?
Very close. As close as a computer version can be, we hope. We are paying close attention to the rules (the combat function alone is Huge!) We plan on fully supporting the reaction rules (in case anyone takes a Charismatic, Very Beautiful character with Voice and Sex Appeal.)

How much of GURPS will the game include?
We won’t be able to use everything, of course. We are going to include all skills, advantages, and disadvantages that make a difference in the game. This is pretty much the way a normal, tabletop version would be run by a competent GM. Most rules are being implemented (especially in combat), with many side-bar rules be implemented as optional rules adjusted by the player.

It is interesting that there was as yet no other attempt to create a computer game based on GURPS. While there are countless games based on Dungeons & Dragons, several games based on Shadowrun, and there’s at least one game now based on Call of Cthulhu, no computer game using the GURPS rules was ever finished and released.

An underground damaged vault with some robot friends

This was one of the last GURPS screenshots released, on 1996-08-26 or 29. The map is probably an old version of Vault 15. There are some interesting details here.

The first thing that struck my eye were the elevators. If I remember correctly, in the final version of Fallout all the elevators were of the walk-in type. These platform elevators were not used at all and only revived in Fallout 2 for Navarro. Fallout 2 was a sort of punschkrapfen where all the leftovers were used.

And then there are these two Mr. Handy type “robot friends.” It doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe they were put there just to make the screenshot look more interesting. Or maybe they were really supposed to have some gameplay function, like Unit 462 in the Military Base. After all, a lot of thought went into the design of this robot model, and it is featured in the intro video, so perhaps the designers had bigger plans with it than actually came to pass.

The official GURPS Fallout site preserved

Duck and Cover (which otherwise nowadays specializes mostly on Fallout 3) has a mirror of the old GURPS Fallout official site. It is nearly complete, only one screenshot is missing. Otherwise, the only broken links are those supposed to lead to other parts of the Interplay site. As preserved, the site is fairly exactly fifteen years old, the last modifications were made 1996-09-03. The mirror has existed for five years.

I didn’t learn anything spectacularily new, but a few details are interesting. The oldest pre-release screenshots (the ones that still show a different interface) are dated 1996-05-08, they are “from the E3 Interactive Demo.” Unfortunately this demo seems never to have been published or leaked and is probably lost. The site itself is simpler in design than the later ones, and sports less post-apocalyptic dreariness. The main menu at the top of the pages (which was obviously used site-wide) is quite cheerful. In any case the site is worth checking out for anyone interested in Fallout history!