The game Fallout 3, known as the Van Buren project, from the original developer Interplay, was ready for release in about a year or a little more, but financial situation prevented its release. Developer Timothy Cain, who was invited to assess the readiness of Fallout 3, talked about it.
Cain told the story of the cancellation of the original Fallout 3 on his own YouTube channel. According to Cain, the cancellation of the game was not due to mismanagement, bad leadership, or inexperienced team—only money.
The veteran developer has been delving into the history of role-playing games on YouTube for some time. Timothy Cain has a unique qualification to speak on such topics: his career spans Interplay on Fallout, at Troika on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and at Obsidian, where he was co-director of The Outer Worlds.
So, Cain's last work on Fallout was his involvement in the cancellation of Fallout 3 in 2003. Interplay's vice president asked him to come back for a day to play Fallout Van Buren and evaluate how much time the team would need to complete the game. He agreed, asked the developers questions, played the prototype, and concluded:
“I am convinced that within 18 months you could have released a really good game. Even if you worked in a hard crunch, I don’t think you could have done it faster than 12 months—then you would have released something unbalanced and buggy, and the team would have been destroyed, so I don’t recommend it,” Timothy Cain told Interplay's vice president.
However, in Interplay's difficult financial situation, this deadline was unattainable. Then the vice president explained to Cain that any answer other than six months meant the project's cancellation.
“In the end, it all comes down to money. They were running out of money. He couldn’t afford more than six months of development, and in my opinion, this timeframe was out of the question… Interplay's financial situation was bad. They posted losses for the previous two years… So, the answer I just gave led to the game's cancellation.”
Cain emphasizes that there are no specific "villains" here:
“Some people like there to be a villain in every story, and some of you may now consider me the 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 ultimately led Bethesda to acquire the rights to the series, after which a completely different Fallout 3 was released.
Source: GamesRadar
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