Fallout’s origin can be traced back to a pizza party Tim Cain threw

In the mid-1990s Interplay Entertainment acquired the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and would go on to publish Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale. The team working on a little post-apocalyptic RPG that would eventually be called Fallout was largely left to its own devices in the shadow of those projects, which turned out to be for the best.

Why did this group come together in the first place? Because Fallout’s co-creator Tim Cain lured them in with a pizza party.

Talking to Game Informer for an oral history of Fallout, Tim Cain related the story. His actual job was to program the installers for games, but he’d made a sprite engine in his spare time. He wasn’t allowed to approach people assigned to existing projects with it, however. “So, what I did was I reserved a conference room for 6 p.m.,” Cain explained, “which was when everybody was supposed to go home, and then I sent emails saying, ‘I’ll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine.’

“I really thought that tons of people were going to show up, but I think it was about eight people showed up. And I didn’t realize at the time, but I was self-selecting for go-getters, and Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout’s art director] was somebody who came.”

Since there were so many fantasy RPGs in the works at Interplay and elsewhere at the time, they decided to make a science-fiction game instead. At first, the idea was to make a sequel to Wasteland, which Interplay had developed though it was published by Electronic Arts. Cain downplays the influence Wasteland had on Fallout, however.

“Wasteland,” he said, “which Interplay had made before but didn’t own the rights to it, didn’t factor huge into that. People talk about how much it’s got an influence. Some of the people on the team really liked Wasteland, and everybody looked at it, but we wanted to do our own thing.”

Brian Fargo was one of those people who really liked Wasteland, having been director on Wasteland before serving as executive producer on Fallout. “When we kicked off any titles at Interplay,” Fargo said, “we would do what’s called a vision document, which was, ‘Okay, what are the tenets of this product?’ I remember there was a lot of back and forth, and you know, what were the aspects of Wasteland? Because it started off as a sequel to Wasteland, and then we ended up having to pivot because EA said, ‘No, not going to happen.’ We were being hopeful for a while, but ironically, that pivot ended up being wonderful because we ended up with Fallout, which obviously ended up being a good thing.”