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Somewhere in the ether, there's evidence of the Generic Universal Role Playing System, or GURPS, version of Interplay's Fallout, in which franchise co-creator Tim Cain dumped every adjective he's ever heard of before a botched licensing deal ultimately led the 1997 game to the SPECIAL ruleset current developer Bethesda still uses. Cain is missing most of that evidence – or he thought so, before unearthing a fat list of advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills he shares in a new YouTube video giving us a rare sniff of what Fallout development was like 30 years ago.
"I thought these were lost," Cain says in the video posted May 13. "Well, I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills had it been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout."
Interplay had Cain destroy his archive of the project after he left the company, and the developer apparently misplaced the separate archive Cain handed over before shipping Fallout in 1997. But that's in the past – Cain finally has some proof of the elaborate wasteland GURPS Fallout, and he's eager to share each exhausting detail.
In terms of attributes, strength, health, IQ, and dexterity are a given. "We were of course using all four of those," says Cain, but then there was a whole separate spice cabinet of advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics players could use.
He lists ingredients in a large pot of soup: "Acute hearing, acute taste and smell, acute vision; alertness; [...] ambidexterity; animal empathy; appearance attractive, appearance handsome, and appearance very handsome.
"Charisma; combat reflexes, common sense, danger sense; eidetic memory, high pain threshold, intuition; literacy, luck; night vision, peripheral vision; rapid healing," and you could have good reputation in various Fallout factions, including, in your Vault, Shady Sands, Junktown, the Hub, Brotherhood of Steel, and so on.
"We also added strong will, toughness, and voice," says Cain. These advantages would have all cost character points to purchase, and, "in essence, made the game a little easier in some small aspect," Cain adds. The disadvantage list gleefully kicks up the seesaw and balances that out.
In addition to a number of bad or enemy-level reputations you could earn among all of Fallout's major groups, including your Vault, GURPS Fallout also let you develop "Alcoholism. Odious personal habit: Bad breath. Odious personal habit: Pick nose," says Cain. "Color blindness, hard of hearing, low pain threshold, no sense of smell or taste – it's also called anosmia. One eye; overweight, skinny – those are both disadvantages in GURPS. Stuttering."
GURPS Fallout would have also made you vulnerable to various addictions, including to "physical adders" that adjusted your strength, dex, and hardiness of your health, "mental adders" that boosted IQ, or combat-specific drugs Cain calls "berserk drugs."
These, of course, are all separate to the "bad temper, berserk, blood lust" you could incur, or "code of honor – it's called, 'You Never Break Your Word,' combat paralysis; compulsive lying, delusion: hears voices; gullibility, honesty; lecherousness; pacifism: cannot kill, pacifism: self-defense only; phobia of insects, phobia of monsters, phobia of reptiles, phobia of darkness; sense of duty to the Vault, truthfulness, unluckiness; weak will." Phew. These disadvantages are starting to sound like the reasons for my therapy bill.
Cain says there were additionally three levels of ugliness, from mildly unattractive to, "You're the most disgusting thing ever born in the Vault," Cain explains. "You're lucky they didn't kill you as a mutant." And because this is GURPS Fallout we're talking about, you could also have so many quirks, they might have eventually cast Zooey Deschanel to play you in a movie. Two of my favorite options Cain lists are "hates cows" and "boisterous walker," which would make your footsteps fall like anvils.
As for skills, some highlights GURPS Fallout would have launched with are "jumping," "sex appeal," and Cain says, "savoir-faire, one of my favorite ones, the skill of good manners and getting along in a social setting."
"We had all of those in the game at some level of implementation in early 1997," Cain concludes.
"Tim, not to be too dark," quickly replies one fan on YouTube. "Can you release the source code for Fallout as your last will and testament?"
Not missing a beat, Cain says, "I'd have to have it first."
