'Fallout wasn't designed to have other players': Fallout co-creator Tim Cain was extremely wary of turning it into an MMO
Fallout 76 was not the first attempt to splice the retro post-apocalypse with an MMO. Years before, Fallout's original owner, Interplay, had taken a crack at it. This was actually after Bethesda had purchased the rights to the series, but the two companies came to an arrangement: one that would ultimately devolve into a lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement and the cancellation of Fallout Online.
The concept, though, goes much further back. Bethesda acquired Fallout in 2007, but Interplay founder Brian Fargo had been mulling over the idea since the late '90s. He pitched it to Black Isle Studios, but founder Feargus Urquhart, now CEO of Obsidian, rejected the idea. An MMO just didn't seem very Fallout. Tim Cain, Fallout's co-creator, felt the same way.
After the Black Isle rejection, Interplay's online division, Engage, started working on Fallout Online. Cain had left Interplay by this point, but the company still wanted to pick his brain. «I remember several meetings with them,» he recalls, «where I basically was like, 'I'm super cautious about this, and for multiple reasons.'» One of those reasons was the fact that that acronym would spell out «fool». But his biggest concern was that a game with lots of players did not fit Fallout's themes.
«I said, 'We've designed a game where you're going out in the Wasteland by yourself … And you want to convert it to a game where you come out of your Vault and there's 1,000 other blue and yellow vault-suited people running around. You realize that's a very, very different setting and game and kind of player? And you want to switch it from story-driven to mission-driven.'»
While Fallout had a party system, there's a big difference between travelling with some characters and existing in a world populated by other players. We're used to the idea of being one hero among many now, but this was when the MMO was a nascent genre.
Cain wanted to make sure Interplay understood the risks. «They were like, 'You're being very negative.' And I
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