Reconstructed this document from individual rendered document pages, I can't find the original docx file, if anyone has it feel free to share it.
Because it was rendered as an SVG, the formatting was lost, so this was the only way I could preserve the formatting. Maybe someone at NMA still has the original document, but they ****** their site up and most of the **** is lost.
A few points I wanted to discuss,
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Notably, Scott Campbell had a very different idea of the vaults than Tim Cain did. Cain has said as much that he wanted it to be about going to space and stuff. Campbell definitely had an inkling of the vaults they came to be:
This document further reinforces the argument that Fallout was not some ridiculous critique on capitalism or imperialism or whatever. It was an over the top game about violence and life in a nuclear wasteland. The only consistent ideological theme seems to be critiquing censorship. They even dropped GURPS because they were unwilling to give in to censorship demands.What about the other shelters? Did they have malfunctions? Did they come out once they thought it
was safe? Were they dug out by those unfortunate enough to be outside when the bombs hit? What
about the sanity of these people? What about the almost absolute power their shelter “overseers” could
have over them?
We had already come to the conclusion that this was going to be a bloody game. I think it was Tim that
coined the phrase, “Heap of Gore Technology ™”. (We actually wanted that as a bullet point on the
box.) The idea was, if you score a critical hit which kills an enemy, they fountain blood like a Shaw
Brothers film and fall dead. The methods of their death showed different animations – critical death by
sword and they are cut in half, critical death by machine gun and they shudder with bullet holes before
falling into a pool of gore, blasted by a laser and a smoldering ash pile is all that remains.
I remember him looking up quizzically at me and saying, “Kids too? Do we really want to do that?”
I had a moment of indecision. I had visions of parents walking into little Timmy’s room and watching
aghast as he mercilessly mows down a schoolyard of children with his chain-gun.
Thankfully I stuck to my beliefs and said, “Hell yeah.”
They were fully aware of reverse pick-pocketing before the game launched:We also wanted the characters in our game to speak frankly and crassly – sometimes even curse.
You gotta remember that this was early 1995: the word “***” was still banned from the public airwaves
by the FCC. Lots of people didn’t like the explicit violence in video games, and they spoke loudly to
senators who would gladly like to demonize an emerging artform.
Actually a cool idea to use a vault as your base of operations:Of course, this led to all sorts of interesting situations. Those sick bastards in playtest had the funniest
by far. They would use their character’s Pick Pocket skill on a kid, which would open up a window
showing what that kid had in his pockets. Instead of taking anything, they would instead place a timed
explosive in one of their little pockets. As their character would duck for cover, the innocent little kid
would skip back to his group of friends and then BOOM!
Deathclaw was a repurposed Terrasque from Planescape: TormentI intended the Vault to be your base of operations, allowing you to return there as often as you liked. I
had also planned that the Vault was to be attacked by some of the desert gangs, and eventually by the
Master’s hordes of Super Mutants, dragging your family to the Mariposa Base unless you stopped
them.
So here’s what happened: the newly formed Black Isle started work on what would be Planescape:
Torment. One of the first art pieces was a monstrous creature called a Terrasque. It was sculpted in clay
and was then point-by-painstaking-point digitized into a 3D model. As Planescape moved forward, it
turned out that the Terrasque wouldn’t actually be featured in its design – leaving that tasty model in
disuse…. Thus, the furry wolverine-bear became a hairless reptilian biped. (Take a look at page 339 of
the D&D second edition Monster Manual. Holy cats! It’s a Deathclaw!)
