Joel Burgess

Joel Burgess is a developer who worked at Bethesda Softworks as lead level designer on Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and on Fallout 76 as an additional designer.

Career
For Fallout 3, Burgess created the Liberty Prime sequence in Take it Back!, the Jefferson Memorial drainage chambers in The Waters of Life, and led the design of nearly all points of interest in the Capital Wasteland and downtown Washington, D.C. He also wrote several notes and terminal entries for the game. For the add-on Point Lookout, he served as the lead designer.

Burgess implemented several Easter eggs in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. In a July 2019 Twitter thread discussing Easter eggs and their acceptability in games, he talked about his belief that Easter eggs should make sense and appear believable even to players who are unfamiliar with the reference. He highlighted the Snatcher references in Minefield in Fallout 3 and the Vitale pumphouse in Fallout 4 (the latter containing several other Easter eggs), as well as the Ray Bradbury tribute in the McClellan family townhome in Fallout 3, all of which he implemented.