Creator reveals his involvement cancelling the original Fallout 3

Fallout creator Tim Cain has revealed his role in Van Buren being cancelled, which was the codename of what was going to be the original Fallout 3.

Interplay released Fallout and Fallout 2 in the late 1990s and a third entry in the series by the same developer was originally in the works in the early 2000s.

Cain left Interplay in 1998 but got a call midway through 2003 from the vice president (VP) of the company asking him to test the game out, to which Cain couldn't believe.

He and the former VP were close from their time working together; they would regularly play racketball.

Speaking as part of a YouTube series, Cain said the call from the vice president was: "We're making a Fallout game and I'm going to have to cancel it, I don't think they can get it done so I'm just going to cancel it - but if you could come over and look at it and give me an estimate, there's a chance I wouldn't cancel it."

Employees at Troika Games, a former video games company which Cain co-founded and where he was working at the time, encouraged him to avoid it.

But Cain said he was made to feel as though if he didn't act, the game would be completely gone, whereas if he did, there was a chance he could help save it.

So a tech demo was set up for him.

"I played it for a couple of hours and the VP came in and he said he had one question for me - 'how long do you think it would take the team to complete this game and make it shippable?'"

Cain replied by saying "in 18 months, you could have a really good game shipped".

"Huh, 18 months? Could it be done any faster?," Cain said the VP replied.

"Shoot, I've said too long. I said 'well, even if you did a deathmarch crunch, I don't think you could do it faster than 12, and then you'd be shipping somethings that unbalanced and buggy, the team would be destroyed and I don't recommend that."

It was soon revealed to him any answer over six months meant the game would be cancelled as "they were running out of money and they could not afford a [longer] development time".

Eventually, the Fallout IP was auctioned off and acquired by Bethesda, who released Fallout 3 in 2008, after Interplay went bankrupt into 2007.

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