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Before he was the big Bethesda Game Studios boss, Todd Howard worked as a producer for the company – and during that time, he discovered the beauty of Fallout's post-apocalyptic wasteland … all thanks to a copy he snagged off his brother.
Yep, that's right. Todd Howard was introduced to Fallout via his sibling in 1997, as he tells Game Informer in a recent interview on the history of the series. It wasn't a Bethesda title at the time, having been developed and published by Interplay Productions, so Howard found out about it through his brother after his high praise of the RPG.
"I was at Bethesda at the time when [Fallout] came out. It's my brother who actually played it first," he recalls. "He's like, 'Have you played Fallout?' And I said, 'I haven’t had the chance yet.' He said, 'You've gotta play it.'"
That's when Howard did what any one of us would probably do to our brother: "I actually stole his disc and never gave it back to him." It's amusing, but Howard was infatuated with Fallout – a premonition of things to come for him and Bethesda, really, if you ask me. "I loved the vibe of that game," as he puts it.
"There were things that were sort of post-apocalyptic role-playing on the pen-and-paper side, to where you had Gamma World and, obviously, Wasteland, which was kind of a precursor to Fallout," Howard goes on, describing how Fallout felt like it stood apart.
"So, I've always been interested in the rules of a world, and I felt that, obviously, the way the game played, but the rules of the world and the vibe of the world, they were just brilliant and so unique."
He concludes with praise for the Vault Boy – the now-iconic face of the Fallout series – in the original game, and admits he "played it to death." I'm left wondering whether or not his brother ever asked for the copy back… and if he might now that the cat's out of the bag?
I'm sure both have plenty of Fallout discs and whatnot in their lives now that Bethesda has the IP under its belt and Howard has directed the games since Fallout 3, but still. Principle, and all that.
