Already at the end of the 1990s there were efforts to develop a large SF MMORPG based on Fallout. If developer Brian Fargo had had his way, we would have been able to play Fallout Online back then, with Black Isle as the publisher behind us, who later released Baldur’s Gate. But there were difficulties and legitimate objections, including from Fallout creator Tim Cain.
What was it like back then?? Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were released in 1997 and 1998 by Interplay and Black Isles respectively and were huge successes as SF role-playing games.
Ultima Online was released in 1997 and then Everquest in 1999. So MMORPGs were fashionable.
Therefore, it was actually obvious to turn Fallout into an online MMORPG. In any case, the founder of Interplay, the now legendary game developer Brian Fargo (62), had the idea.
Ultimately, the Fallout MMO was released, but almost 20 years later than originally thought:
Everything you need to know about Fallout 76 – in 2 minutes
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The idea for a Fallout MMORPG immediately met with a lot of resistance
What happened to the idea?? The then head of Black Isle Studios, Feargus Urquhart, rejected Fargo’s idea of developing a Fallout MMORPG. To him, it didn’t sound like Fallout (via pcgamer) and he simply didn’t trust Interplay to undertake the task of developing an MMORPG.
So nothing came of the project at Black Isle: They continued to develop their big single-player role-playing games like Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale and released Baldur’s Gate from BioWare.
Urquhart is quoted as saying (via fandom):
Although I would have loved to make a Fallout MMO, the reason I turned it down was because I believed Interplay simply didn’t have the resources to do it. If you want to make an MMO, it costs $100 million before you bring it to market; you have to buy servers, you need service people and you need game masters. This is a big undertaking, and on top of that it means you have to take care of all these things, so what else can you focus on? What other games can they develop?
But Interplay’s online division itself, Engage, began developing Fallout Online. To gather ideas for the project, they turned to Tim Cain, one of the creators of Fallout. He had already left Interplay by then, but was still asked for advice.
But Cain immediately found the idea stupid.
Creator of Fallout had many objections to an MMORPG
What bothered the creator of Fallout about the MMO idea? At first it was a very banal reason, because a “Fallout Online” would have been abbreviated as “FOOL,” the English word for “idiot,” Cain tells PCGamer in an interview.
But Cain had further objections:
I said, ‘We made a game where you walk around the wasteland alone… And you want to turn it into a game where you come out of your tomb and there are 1,000 other people walking around in blue and yellow vault suits. Do you realize that this is a completely different setting, a completely different game and a completely different type of player? And they want to change it from a story-driven to a mission-driven variant.
Interplay then had the idea of making the instances smaller so that there were fewer players in the world.
But Cain still had concerns: The main character, the Vault Dweller, would no longer feel unique if there were 100 or 1,000 of him.
Financial and legal problems prevented the release of Fallout Online in the 2000s
And that’s why they discontinued it? From what we know, work on a project that would later become Fallout Online began in November 2006. But Interplay apparently ran into financial difficulties; In 2007, Bethesda acquired the rights to the Fallout series for $5.75 million. However, a special rule allowed Interplay to continue working on the Fallout MMO – but they had to meet certain conditions so that they did not lose the license.
Ultimately, the project was officially presented in June 2010, but by that time Interplay was already experiencing such severe financial difficulties that the company was on the verge of dissolution. In 2011, the studio was finally banned from further developing the game. In 2012, the rights to the Fallout MMO finally passed to Bethesda.
All the concerns that the creator had about Fallout 76 were their own
How did that end? It wasn’t until many years later, after Bethesda acquired the Fallout license, that an MMO for Fallout was released: Fallout 76. It came out in 2018 and all the concerns that Cain had before, fans of the role-playing games had again.
Cain has made peace with Fallout 76: He says that Fallout 76 came out after Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and that the games laid the foundation for building new settlements, as happens in Fallout 76. So the time was right:
Then Fallout 3 came out, and then Fallout 4 came out, and now you have an idea of the line it follows, and Fallout 76 is on that line. In Fallout 1 and 2 it was a different vector.
It’s definitely an exciting “what if” question to imagine what would have happened if a Fallout MMORPG had been released before WoW – and with one of the hottest publishers at the time, Black Isle, behind it. How would fans have received it? Would it have succeeded or would it have been one of the many MMORPGs that died quickly? 19 dead MMORPGs that WoW has already outlived