Interviews// Bethesda's Pete Hines: The E3 '07 Fallout 3 Interview
Nobody enters, nobody leaves
Pete Hines: Yeah, not just the quality, but how different the original games were for their time, you know? They really broke the mould of all of the classical fantasy stuff being done around that time.
Bethesda had just put out Daggerfall around that time (1996) for example. Fallout really cut against the fantasy grain and did some pretty unique things: with full facial animations, lip-syncing and that kind of thing. It definitely resonated and has stuck with folks – both rabid and non-rabid; both those who have talked about it every day of their lives since it first came out, and those who just really liked it and can’t wait to play another one.
SPOnG: Have you considered bundling versions of those earlier Fallout games with Fallout 3?
Pete Hines: No. They are still out there. Interplay still has the ability to sell and distribute those. They are also based on a completely different generation of hardware and operating systems. It can be difficult to get that stuff to run. We’re basically moving forward with where we want to take it and not re-treading stuff that came out nearly ten years ago.
Pete Hines: The bombs fell in 2077, so its set 200 years after the bombs fell. Basically it is the story of your character who is born in the Vault. You spend the first part of the game, your entire life to that point, in the Vault. So, you flash through different periods of your early life, and at every step of the way your father, who is played by Liam Neeson, is there. So, you see yourself as a baby, you see yourself at ten years old, and so forth. You are creating a character, as well as learning a bit about the game and doing some quests and stuff.
Then one day you wake up and it’s your nineteenth birthday and your father is gone. Nobody in over two hundred years has ever entered or left the Vault – so this is a shocking thing not only to you but to everybody in the Vault.
The overseer who is in charge of the Vault is obviously very upset that somebody has broken the cardinal rule, “Nobody enters, nobody leaves”, and also he thinks you have something to do with your father’s disappearance - of course, you don’t.
You have no idea why he left. You expected him to be there and he’s not. So this is kind of the jumping off point. The overseer’s thugs are out to get you and you basically figure out a way to break out of the Vault like your father did to go in search of him.
“What was so important? Why did he leave me behind? What did he need to go and do? Where is he?” These are the questions you ask yourself and these are your reasons for leaving the Vault and venturing out into this post-nuclear wasteland.
Pete Hines: Yep, Ron Perlman (Hellboy) is the narrator – he was the narrator in the first two games. Those are really the only two guys we’re talking about right now.
There are also other iconic things from the series in Fallout 3 from the first two games such as The Ink Spots, who were this great band from the 1940’s and 50’s era who did the theme-song for the original games . We licensed one of their most popular tracks – the one that the original developers wanted to use in the original Fallout but couldn’t get the rights to. So that’s the I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire tune, from the teaser trailer, and also from where the game starts.
So, its little things like this. We’re big fans of the series and what it did and what it was about and we want to stay as true as possible to everything – sound effects, voiceover, music, whatever it is.
SPOnG: Why use 1940’s and 50’s style music?
Pete Hines: So the set-up for Fallout is that basically the world as we know it splits off from our current timeline after World War II and diverges on a different timeline and the future that they go on is basically that whole kind of ‘Leave It To Beaver’ '50s idea of ‘tomorrow-land’ – so what they thought the future was going to be like back then, with robot-maids and rocket-cars and jetpacks and laser rifles and so on [doesn't go away]. So that 40’s and 50’s stuff doesn’t go away.
It just continues on through their history. Until the bombs fall in 2077. So it's really just a tomorrow-land version of the 50s that’s all blown to hell!
And then when you come back into this destroyed world you still have people trying to preserve their 1950s hairstyles and listening to the same music and whatnot – that’s ‘the shtick’ of it – its not the timeline that we are on now that gets blown up, its all about this completely separate alternate universe where it's all about nuclear powered this and fusion-generators and stuff.