Fallout, the beloved video game franchise that mixes 50s retro-futurism with the apocalypse, has its roots in a role-playing game...and then attempted two different licensing deals with role-playing game companies before they were tripped up by legal challenges. From Tunnels & Trolls to GURPS to D20 Modern, Fallout's evolution was intertwined with both video game and tabletop gaming history.
[h=3]Tunnels & Trolls[/h]Game designer Ken St. Andre created Tunnels & Trolls in response to the wargaming roots so evident in Dungeons & Dragons.To St. Andre, the game was needlessly complex, took itself far too seriously, and required weird dice nobody had. St. Andre changed all that with Tunnels & Trolls and, by releasing the game quickly on the heels of D&D's debut, quickly found an audience. His partnership with Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo helped Tunnels & Trolls find its audience. This in turn led to the hiring of Mike Stackpole, who created a modernized version of Tunnels & Trolls titled Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes -- a role-playing game that moved away from classes entirely to a skill-based system that used attribute + skill to determine success rolls. That's when Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay, discovered the game as told by Jimmy Maher:
Fargo contacted St. Andre, who came up with a name that will be familiar to fans of Fallout: Wasteland. Wasteland's tabletop roots were apparent in its release:
St. Andre recruited Stackpole, who was initially skeptical, but soon joined the project along with St. Andre:
As had been Fargo’s plan from the beginning, Wasteland‘s rules would be a fairly faithful translation of Stackpole’s Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes tabletop RPG, which was in turn built on the foundation of Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls. A clear evolutionary line thus stretched from the work that St. Andre did back in 1975 to Wasteland more than a decade later. No CRPG to date had tried quite as earnestly as Wasteland would to bring the full tabletop experience to the computer.
Wasteland's innovations were significant: it allowed multiple approaches to any task (like smashing open a door, picking a lock, or blowing it up with explosives); featured a persistent world with persistent characters that could be revisited after the game was over; and launched the open world sandbox approach of tabletop play in the computer RPG field with limited hardware resources. The setting was a hyper-violent, anything-goes approach that might be familiar to players of games like Gamma World:
The nuclear apocalypse that led to the situation your characters find themselves in is described as having taken place in 1998, only ten years on from the date of Wasteland‘s release. Yet when the writers find it convenient they litter the game with absurdly advanced technology, from human clones to telepathic mind links. And the tone of the writing veers about as well, perhaps as a result of the sheer number of designers who contributed to the game. Most of the time Wasteland is content with the comic ultra-violence of The Evil Dead, but occasionally it suddenly reaches toward a jarring epic profundity it hasn’t earned. The main storyline, which doesn’t kick in in earnest until about halfway through the game, is so silly and nonsensical that few of even the most hardcore Wasteland fans remember much about it, no matter how many times they’ve played through it.
Many of Wasteland's trademarks, including the flexibility of its skill system and its humorous, hyper-violent tone, would continue in Fallout.
[h=3]The Fallout Connection[/h]For reasons primarily due to ownership rights, Wasteland is not officially part of the Fallout universe, but it served as a "spiritual successor" to Fallout, with numerous callbacks to the earlier game littered throughout subsequent installments. It created many iconic characters and phrases, from the Brotherhood of Steel to Deathclaws. Most iconic of all is the above picture, which memorialized the development team -- a motley crew of tabletop game designers and coders:
Shortly before Wasteland‘s belated release, St. Andre, Stackpole, and Pavlish, along with a grab bag of the others who had worked with them, headed out to the Sonoran Desert for a photo shoot. Everyone scoured the oddities in the backs of their closets and the local leather shops for their costumes, and a professional makeup team was recruited to help turn them all into warriors straight out of Mad Max. Bill Heineman, an avid gun collector, provided much of the weaponry they carried. The final picture, featured on the inside cover of Wasteland‘s package, has since become far more iconic than the art that appeared on its front, a fitting tribute to this unique team and their unique vision.
From left to right the designers pictured are: Ken St. Andre (leather vest and brown fedora), Michael Stackpole (black leather jacket), Bill Dugan, Nishan Hossepian, Chris Christensen, Alan Pavlish, Bruce Schlickbernd.
Their iconic vision would continue with another role-playing system: The Generic Universal Role-playing System known as GURPS, as we'll see in the next installment.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
[h=3]Tunnels & Trolls[/h]Game designer Ken St. Andre created Tunnels & Trolls in response to the wargaming roots so evident in Dungeons & Dragons.To St. Andre, the game was needlessly complex, took itself far too seriously, and required weird dice nobody had. St. Andre changed all that with Tunnels & Trolls and, by releasing the game quickly on the heels of D&D's debut, quickly found an audience. His partnership with Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo helped Tunnels & Trolls find its audience. This in turn led to the hiring of Mike Stackpole, who created a modernized version of Tunnels & Trolls titled Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes -- a role-playing game that moved away from classes entirely to a skill-based system that used attribute + skill to determine success rolls. That's when Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay, discovered the game as told by Jimmy Maher:
Brian Fargo, founder and head of a little Orange County developer called Interplay, was in the process of finishing his company’s first CRPG, a Wizardry-like dungeon delver called The Bard’s Tale that had been written primarily by his old high-school buddy Michael Cranford and would soon be published by Electronic Arts. But Fargo already had grander ambitions. He loved pulpy post-apocalyptic fictions: the movies The Omega Man and Mad Max, the comic book Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. The post-apocalyptic CRPG he was dreaming of would be the first of its type, and must entail more than mapping endless mazes and slaughtering endless hordes of monsters — not that a little slaughtering would be amiss, mind you. Looking at Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes, a game he liked very much, he started thinking about another first: working with experienced tabletop designers to translate a set of tabletop mechanics, which even in the rule-lights form favored by Flying Buffalo were far more complex than those of the typical CRPG, to the computer.
Fargo contacted St. Andre, who came up with a name that will be familiar to fans of Fallout: Wasteland. Wasteland's tabletop roots were apparent in its release:
Released in 1988 on the PC, Wasteland was a pioneering RPG. Set in a post-apocalyptic future in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the player controlled a team of soldiers sent on a mission into a...wasteland. It was one of the first games to ever boast a persistent world, and also featured a rich and flexible approach to its obstacles and combat. It even tied into the real world by including documentation in the box that had to be kept tucked away and only read when the game instructed you to. Most importantly, though, it set the tone which Fallout would follow a decade later. Wasteland was a dry, violent and smart video game. Its NPCs would sometimes bluntly refuse your requests. It revelled in the damage and pain you could inflict on your opponents, to the point where publishers EA stuck a PG-13 sticker on the box, despite the fact games didn't really need to be rated back then.
St. Andre recruited Stackpole, who was initially skeptical, but soon joined the project along with St. Andre:
Fargo’s choice of partners proved a good one in more ways than one. St. Andre and Stackpole were both very well-acquainted with computer games and didn’t look down on them, a quality that stood them in marked contrast to many of their peers from the tabletop world. Both had become active electronic as well as tabletop gamers in recent years, and both had parlayed this new hobby, as they had their earlier, into paying gigs by writing articles, reviews, and columns for magazines like Computer Gaming World and Questbusters. St. Andre had developed a special enthusiasm for Electronic Arts’s Adventure Construction Set, a system for making simple CRPGs without programming that wasn’t all that far removed in its do-it-yourself spirit from Tunnels & Trolls. He served as head of an officially recognized Adventure Construction Set fan club.
[h=3]Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes[/h]As it turned out, the rules translation from tabletop to video game was always part of Wasteland's development:As had been Fargo’s plan from the beginning, Wasteland‘s rules would be a fairly faithful translation of Stackpole’s Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes tabletop RPG, which was in turn built on the foundation of Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls. A clear evolutionary line thus stretched from the work that St. Andre did back in 1975 to Wasteland more than a decade later. No CRPG to date had tried quite as earnestly as Wasteland would to bring the full tabletop experience to the computer.
Wasteland's innovations were significant: it allowed multiple approaches to any task (like smashing open a door, picking a lock, or blowing it up with explosives); featured a persistent world with persistent characters that could be revisited after the game was over; and launched the open world sandbox approach of tabletop play in the computer RPG field with limited hardware resources. The setting was a hyper-violent, anything-goes approach that might be familiar to players of games like Gamma World:
The nuclear apocalypse that led to the situation your characters find themselves in is described as having taken place in 1998, only ten years on from the date of Wasteland‘s release. Yet when the writers find it convenient they litter the game with absurdly advanced technology, from human clones to telepathic mind links. And the tone of the writing veers about as well, perhaps as a result of the sheer number of designers who contributed to the game. Most of the time Wasteland is content with the comic ultra-violence of The Evil Dead, but occasionally it suddenly reaches toward a jarring epic profundity it hasn’t earned. The main storyline, which doesn’t kick in in earnest until about halfway through the game, is so silly and nonsensical that few of even the most hardcore Wasteland fans remember much about it, no matter how many times they’ve played through it.
Many of Wasteland's trademarks, including the flexibility of its skill system and its humorous, hyper-violent tone, would continue in Fallout.
[h=3]The Fallout Connection[/h]For reasons primarily due to ownership rights, Wasteland is not officially part of the Fallout universe, but it served as a "spiritual successor" to Fallout, with numerous callbacks to the earlier game littered throughout subsequent installments. It created many iconic characters and phrases, from the Brotherhood of Steel to Deathclaws. Most iconic of all is the above picture, which memorialized the development team -- a motley crew of tabletop game designers and coders:
Shortly before Wasteland‘s belated release, St. Andre, Stackpole, and Pavlish, along with a grab bag of the others who had worked with them, headed out to the Sonoran Desert for a photo shoot. Everyone scoured the oddities in the backs of their closets and the local leather shops for their costumes, and a professional makeup team was recruited to help turn them all into warriors straight out of Mad Max. Bill Heineman, an avid gun collector, provided much of the weaponry they carried. The final picture, featured on the inside cover of Wasteland‘s package, has since become far more iconic than the art that appeared on its front, a fitting tribute to this unique team and their unique vision.
From left to right the designers pictured are: Ken St. Andre (leather vest and brown fedora), Michael Stackpole (black leather jacket), Bill Dugan, Nishan Hossepian, Chris Christensen, Alan Pavlish, Bruce Schlickbernd.
Their iconic vision would continue with another role-playing system: The Generic Universal Role-playing System known as GURPS, as we'll see in the next installment.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
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