Wasteland director Brian Fargo says Interplay did "everything we could not to be sued by Electronic Arts" after moving on from the 1988 EA-published post-apocalyptic RPG and making the first Fallout.
Speaking in an interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube (below), Fargo, who co-founded Interplay Productions in 1983, explains: "What a lot of people don't know was that [Fallout] was a sequel to Wasteland. People don't know the story behind that. That's why it went from tunnels and trolls and then we needed a system – mercenaries, spies, and private eyes – and then that's how we got the skill-based system with Wasteland, and then that went to Fallout."
He continues, noting that "we were actually working on it for a while and about some months in we had to pivot out of it. And people, they forgot, Shadowclaws were Deathclaws. We did everything we could not to be sued by Electronic Arts – to not do too much."
Beyond that, one iconic Fallout line also sounds rather familiar, when you think about it. "Even in Fallout, it was ''your life ends in the wasteland,'" he adds.
Obviously, despite the similarities in concept between Wasteland and Fallout – which were both set in post-nuclear America – EA didn't take legal action against Interplay's 1997 RPG. It's a good job, too – who knows where the series might have ended up had the devs run into trouble with its debut?
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