The Fallout 3 game, known as the Van Buren project, from the original developer Interplay, was ready for release in about a year or so, but the financial situation prevented its release. This was told by developer Timothy Kane, who was invited to assess the readiness of Fallout 3.
Kane told the story of the cancellation of the original Fallout 3 on his own channel YouTube. According to Kane, the game’s cancellation is not the fault of mismanagement, bad managers, or an inexperienced team – it’s just money.
The veteran developer has been immersed in the history of role-playing games on YouTube for some time now. Timothy Kane is uniquely qualified to speak on such topics: his career spans Interplay’s Fallout, Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines and Obsidian, where he co-directed The Outer Worlds.
. https://youtu.be/OwoWRj0cfag
So, Kane’s last work on Fallout was his involvement in the cancellation of Fallout 3 in 2003. The vice president of Interplay asked him to come back for a day to play Fallout Van Buren and estimate how long it would take the team to complete the game. He agreed, asked questions of the developers, played the prototype, and came to a conclusion:
«I’m convinced that you could release a really good game in 18 months. Even if you were working in a heavy crunch, I don’t think you could do it faster than 12 months – then you would release something unbalanced and buggy and the team would be destroyed, so I don’t recommend it», — Timothy Kane told Interplay’s vice president.
However, in Interplay’s difficult financial situation, this deadline was unrealistic. The vice president then explained to Kane that any answer short of six months would mean the project would be canceled.
«In the end, it all comes down to money. They were running out of money. They couldn’t afford to develop for more than six months, and in my opinion, that was out of the question… Interplay’s financials were bad. They had published losses for the previous two years… So the answer I just gave led to the cancellation of».
Kane emphasizes that there are no specific «villains»:
«Some people like to have a villain in every story, and some of you will now think of me as a villain… This is more of an example of what happens in game development and why almost every question people ask about game development has the same answer: money».
The cancellation of Fallout Van Buren did not lead to immediate layoffs, but they were expected. The company’s financial problems eventually led to Bethesda buying the rights to the series, which was followed by the release of a completely different Fallout 3.
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Source: GamesRadar