Tim Cain: ‘Among other things that Steve Jackson Games didn’t like about Fallout was Vault Boy’

It’s well-known trivia among Fallout tragics like myself that the videogame was originally designed with the rules of GURPS, a tabletop game whose name stood for Generic Universal Role-Play System, published by Steve Jackson Games. (That’s American Steve Jackson, not the British Steve Jackson who co-founded Games Workshop.) A deal between Fallout studio Interplay and Steve Jackson Games fell through though, the two parting ways without either side seeming clear on what the disagreement was about.

For his part, Steve Jackson has said he didn’t even realize there was a problem until someone in the press rang him up to ask for a quote about the deal ending. On the other side, various Interplay staff have mentioned Jackson’s distaste for the violent opening cutscene as a significant part of the dispute.

In a recent video on the history of Fallout’s Vault Boy, the game’s co-creator Tim Cain points out the cartoon mascot was another of the things Jackson objected to. It’s tough to imagine Fallout without its poster boy now, and as Cain explains in the video, having consistent cartoons for the RPG’s many skills and perks that were readable even at icon size was incredibly useful. They made the right choice in keeping him.

At the time, PC Gamer’s RPG columnist Michael Wolf spoke to Interplay’s Feargus Urquhart to ask what Jackson objected to. Wolf wrote in the April 1988 issue, “He didn’t like the violence in the introduction, Urquhart says; he wanted to make the game’s characters bigger, with more details on the weapons; and he didn’t like the little characters that represent the different skills in the game—in fact, he wanted those Monopoly-style cartoon characters pulled out. After wrangling back and forth with the developers and going over the contract (which apparently said Jackson had control over the environment in which the license is used—pretty vague), Jackson basically said that if Interplay went ahead with Fallout as is, he’d take action. Rather than dealing with red tape, Interplay dropped the license.”