<center>
</center>
- Tell us a little about yourself, what have you accomplished in life?
I’ve been a Californian all my life, raised in the town of Newbury Park up in Ventura County. After graduating from UCLA back in ’98, I cancelled my plans for law school and took a very low-paying QA job at Interplay instead. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time…
But, the job was a heck of a lot of fun, despite the long hours, lack of prestige, and crappy pay. Eventually, I worked up the courage to submit a design test to Black Isle. I utterly crushed the competition (or so I like to imagine) and got brought onboard as a junior designer for Jefferson and then Van Buren.
In my post-Interplay days, I have successfully brought greenery and life to the once-barren patch of land out in front of my townhouse.
- What are your favourite computer games/board games and why?
Ultima: I’ve got almost of all the Ultimas in pristine condition (original boxes, complete with cloth maps and trinkets) in a prominent position on my game shelf. That series was my introduction to the RPG genre. The storylines were fantastic and the series seemed to get better and better with every sequel. Until Ultima 8 (bleh) and Ultima 9 (double bleh) came out, anyway.
Other games on my shelf include Starflight, Darklands, System Shock 2, Thief, Homeworld, Planescape: Torment, Jagged Alliance 2, Deus Ex, The Longest Journey, Crusader: No Remorse, Crusader: No Regret, Knights of the Old Republic, and of course, Fallout 1 and 2. Each of those had features and game play that just hooked me for many hours.
- What hobbies do you have besides computer games?
I practice Tai Chi (once in awhile), cruise the nearby canyons on my motorcycle (a very battered Kawasaki), and when I get the opportunity, I travel. I’m planning on using my rather erratic employment schedule to sneak off this fall and wander around Nepal for a month or so. I’ve been daydreaming about climbing Everest and burying a Fallout CD up there.
- What are your favourite bands/artists (music) ?
I’m not normally big on music, but I did poach a lot of songs off of Sawyer’s hard drive, so I guess he and I have similar taste.
- Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3 (Van Buren)/Tactics ?
Fallout 1 and 2 were before my time at Interplay, but those two were one of the reasons I looked to Interplay for employment in the first place.
As for Fallout 3, I was a content designer – NPCs, areas, dialogs, quests, etc. I was also the team rookie, which meant I spent a lot of time nodding my head and pretending to know what the hell the other guys were talking about.
- What’s your favourite Fallout memory?
Burst-firing my SMG into one of the Khans at the Raider Camp and seeing the “bullet-riddled jiggle of death” animation for the first time.
- What specifically inspired Fallout for you? What were the biggest influences?
Real-world stuff, actually. Things like environmental degradation, unsustainable population growth, competition for natural resources, etc. I wanted plausible reasons for my areas to exist before adding wacky Fallout stuff to them.
- Pop Culture played a big role in Fallout, what pop culture influences you?
I’m not really influenced by anything, but I do pay attention to what people are into these days.
- How was it to be a part of the Fallout team?
Very awesome… and intimidating. After all, I hadn’t really done anything as a designer yet, and there I was, with my own areas, NPCs, and quests, for a AAA title like Fallout 3. So, the pressure was on to make an impressive debut as a designer. And, you know, justify getting promoted to Black Isle in the first place.
- Were there things that you wished you had added to either Fallouts?
Um, the ability to level up and properly equip my companions in Fallout 1, for sure. It was very sad to stand there in my Power Armor, enduring a sandstorm of minigun bullets, while my buddies got turned into flying chunks of meat.
I would also have very much liked to have been able to arm towns like Shady Sands with all the extra weapons and armor I collected, especially after cleaning out The Glow. It seemed like such a waste to sell off all that stuff. It’s not like I needed the caps at that point in the game. It would have been cool to be able to put all the low-level crap you eventually ended up with to good use instead of burdening some poor shopkeeper in The Hub with 10,000 sets of leather armor and assault rifles.
- What were you favourite places in fallout and why?
The Glow, hands down. So very, very spooky in there. I made the mistake of playing numerous games with ZAX, unaware that hours were passing by and that my Rad-X was wearing off. Whoops.
- What is your hope for future Fallout games? Would you like to be a part of a future Fo team?
Well, I hope there will be future Fallout games, for one. The PC RPG kind, not the action-oriented console kind. Of course, I’d love to be a part of the team again, even if it’s only to fetch coffee. I am a most excellent Bringer of Coffee.
- Who would you bring with you in a future Fallout team and why?
Chris Avellone, because he’s Mr. Fallout, and Josh Sawyer, because he’s got a keen eye for the roolz. I’m sure that with the two of them at the helm, a kickass Fallout RPG could be turned out.
- In your opinion, what are the key ingredients that every RPG should have?
Reactivity. Player should be able to make choices that have a visible impact on the game world. At a minimum, NPCs should eventually either be cheering him on or cursing his name wherever he goes. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s fun little activities like blowing up Hoover Dam and unleashing a tidal wave of toxic, radioactive water, wiping out whole towns and permanently altering the game world’s landscape.
Replayability. Fallout had replayability. I’ve gone through as a charismatic pacifist, a jinxed idiot brawler, a sneaky gunslinger, and, in Fallout 2, a low-tech tribal (although I was forced to don Power Armor for the endgame). A big aspect of replayability is variety in character creation, but there should also be quests and such in the game which you simply can’t do unless you’re emphasizing certain skills. That way, you’ll have to do things differently the next time through if you want to see that part of the game.
Moddability. I’m a big fan of tinkering with games after I’m done playing them the way the devs intended to be played. While a full-fledged editor is probably too much to hope for, it’d be nice if files for things like textures and item data were more accessible and modifiable.
- Where do you see computer RPGs going?
The way of adventure games, I think. Obviously, publishers and developers want to work on games that they’re pretty sure will sell well and turn a profit, but there is a market for PC RPGs. I hope more publishers/developers in the future realize this and take the chance to bring about a new era of RPGs.
- How does the fan base hinder/help the projects that you’ve worked on?
There’s no hindrance, as far as I can tell. I liked reading all the feedback on the boards, criticism and praise alike. Seeing everyone’s excitement for the title made me work harder on my stuff so it would hopefully live up to expectations.
- When planning the story how do you go through the process of integrating themes and story with the constraints on software?
I just make up stuff as I go along. If, when working with the editor, I found that my idea just wasn’t going to work with the game engine, I modified my idea so that it would.
- If you could make any computer game that you wanted, which would it be and why?
I’d do something like Starflight but with heavier RPG elements, naturally. Customizable ship and crew, remote unexplored regions of space, mysterious alien artifacts, etc.
- Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Hopefully, in the game industry with at least one shipped RPG title under my belt, dammit.
Barring that, I want to be a successful lawyer with an expensive luxury car and a hot young trophy wife.
- Any last word to the Fallout fan base?
Darren Monahan is responsible for the whole “Huggies” thing. He will pay.