"When Bethesda bought the Fallout license," RPG legend Josh Sawyer figured his "dream" of making a Fallout game was dead – until New Vegas came along

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has a long history with the post-apocalyptic RPG series going back to his time at Black Isle Studios, the development house that originally created the franchise. There, he worked on the original Fallout 3 – codenamed Van Buren – before financial troubles killed the project and the company. According to Sawyer, Fallout was a dream project, and he figured he'd never get another chance at the series. That is, until New Vegas came along.

After the release of Fallout 3, Bethesda wanted to return to The Elder Scrolls to create what would eventually become Skyrim. But the company still wanted to keep Fallout's successful revival going, which is why it wanted to offer a spin-off project to another studio. Obsidian, which was founded by a number of ex-Black Isle employees, seemed like a perfect fit.

"I was stunned, honestly," Sawyer tells Game Informer. "When I first came to Black Isle in 1999, it was my dream to work on a Fallout game. The studio got that chance in early 2003, when we were working on our version of Fallout 3. Around late 2003, Interplay started having serious financial troubles. I left Black Isle to go to Midway San Diego and later to Obsidian. When Bethesda bought the Fallout license a few years later, I figured I would never have a chance to work on the series again."

Many of the scrapped ideas for Van Buren were eventually reintegrated into New Vegas, and Sawyer figures that Obsidian's continuity with Black Isle helped keep the spirit of the original games alive. "This is maybe an overly simplistic view," he explains, "but in a lot of ways, I feel like the tenets of the franchise were already closely aligned with Obsidian’s. Black Isle’s DNA heavily influenced Obsidian, even with a new generation of developers."

Bethesda's Fallout 3 offered plenty of freedom to explore, but its quests weren't as open-ended and reactive as those in the original Black Isle games. "In my mind, I went back to what I loved about the first Fallout: being able to go anywhere, to skip sections of the critical path, to kill anyone (or no one) and still complete the main quest," Sawyer says. "These aren’t elements in all Obsidian games (or Black Isle games) but they felt important for New Vegas. I also think it was important for us to hit a good balance of serious themes with goofball humor. Fallout has always dealt with important topics in a heartfelt way but can also be stupidly hilarious."

These days, New Vegas is usually ranked as the best Fallout game, thanks to its ability to blend the deep role-playing options of the older games with the more streamlined, immersive gameplay of the Bethesda era. But "it took about 5 years" for New Vegas to win over fans, according to Sawyer, since it launched in a very buggy state and looked a whole lot like Fallout 3. I guess genius really is never respected in its own time.

Fallout devs wanted uber-violent deaths to feel "like an R-rated version of Warner Bros cartoons" back in the '90s: "It was supposed to be funny."