5) Van Buren (Fallout 3)
The trouble with selling the rights to an entire series on to another publisher is that something always gets lost in translation.
Interplay sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda back in the noughties in order to prevent itself from going under, the series’ changing of hands ultimately leading to the latter releasing Fallout 3 in 2008 to near-universal critical acclaim. Bethesda’s reboot retained much of the zany humor and 50s inspired sci-fi tropes that made the originals so successful, but very little of the gameplay style that made the original titles so successful remained.
There’s, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with Bethesda opting to reinvent the series for a modern audience – there’s a decade of technological progress separating Fallout 2 and 3 from each other – but for some long-term fans, the developer’s interpretation was too much of a divergence from what came before. That’s the curse of personal taste for you.
Given Fallout 3‘s (and its successor’s) overall success, though, we should all be ecstatic that Bethesda poured its heart and soul into doing Black Isle’s post-apocalyptic cesspool of a world justice, but just like the alternate timeline in which the series is set, events could have played out very differently.
Black Isle had almost wrapped up work on its own indirect sequel to Fallout 2 prior to Bethesda’s acquisition of the IP, which was to take place predominantly in Utah and Colorado and focus on rising tensions between the Brotherhood of Steel and New California Republic factions. The project (codenamed Van Buren) was close enough to completion as to be in a playable state, but never saw the light of day due to the studio’s closure and subsequent disbanding. But don’t worry, there’s a good ending.
Various members of Black Isle went on to found Obsidian Entertainment, which would eventually get to realize the various themes and narrative elements it had penned for Van Buren in 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas.
