Jesse Heinig

Jesse Heinig (born on July 20, 1973) worked as a programmer and designer on the original Fallout. Among other things, he was responsible for scripting and designing the companions, including Ian and Tycho (originally, the engine did not really have support for party members and they were not in the original design), as well as ZAX. He was also one of the people responsible for creating the SPECIAL character system, for which he was credited also on Fallout 2, despite not being directly involved in the development of the game.

After Fallout, he went on to work at White Wolf as a developer for their role-playing games, working primarily on Mage: The Ascension, Kindred of the East and Mind's Eye Theatre, with some contributions to Vampire: The Masquerade. Later, he worked at Decipher and headed the development of the Star Trek role-playing game until Decipher's RPG division was eventually closed. He spent some time at Activision as a production coordinator on Call of Duty 2 and then went back to college to finish a Computer Science degree.