Fallout vision statement

Fallout Vision Statement - concept document written by Chris Taylor at Interplay about Fallout 1, mentioned by Todd Howard in his diary "Welcome Back to Fallout". Taylor wrote it after talking with Tim Cain and the rest of the team at a team meeting.

This is the document detailing what Fallout was to be, written with management, marketing and sales departments of Interplay in mind (in order to get the project approved), and is a 14-point bulleted list (with some quotes):

You can shoot everything in this game: people, animals, buildings and walls. You can make “called shots” on people, so you can aim for their eyes or their groin. Called shots can do more damage, knock the target unconscious or have other effects. When people die, they don’t just die – they get cut in half, they melt into a pile of goo, explode like a blood sausage, or several different ways – depending on the weapon you use. When I use my rocket launcher on some poor defenseless townsperson, he’ll know (and his neighbors will be cleaning up the blood for weeks!) This is extremely important. Team GURPS is excited to be making this game. Everyone on the team is happy with what they are doing. We want to do this. We care about this game and we will make it cool.''
 * 1) Mega levels of violence. ''(you had better give us that Mature rating right now)
 * This is the wasteland. Life is cheap and violence is all that there is.  We are going to grab the player’s guts and remind him of this. ***''
 * 1) There is often no right solution. Like it or not, the player will not be able to make everyone live happily ever after.
 * 2) There will always be multiple solutions. No one style of play will be perfect.
 * 3) The players actions affect the world.
 * 4) There is a sense of urgency.
 * 5) It's open ended.
 * 6) The player will have a goal.
 * 7) The player has control of his actions.
 * 8) Simple Interface.
 * 9) Speech will be lip-synched with the animation.
 * 10) A wide variety of weapons and actions.
 * 11) Detailed character creation rules.
 * 12) Just enough GURPS material to make the GURPSers happy. The game comes first.
 * 13) The Team is Motivated ''The team is motivated (Tim has incriminating documents on all of us)

Behind the scenes
"Brian was involved with the vision statement by reading it. I wrote the thing after talking with Tim and the rest of the team at a team meeting. I'm pretty sure all the leads had direct input into the vision doc. We had been having problems getting an approved vision statement, IIRC, and I wrote an off-beat one that got approved. The little blurbs in the FO3 post don't quite do it justice.

The mega-level of violence snippet is being taken slightly out of context. Here's the full text:

'''1. Mega levels of violence (you had better give us that Mature rating right now) '''You can shoot everything in this game: people, animals, buildings and walls. You can make “called shots” on people, so you can aim for their eyes or their groin. Called shots can do more damage, knock the target unconscious or have other effects. When people die, they don’t just die – they get cut in half, they melt into a pile of goo, explode like a blood sausage, or several different ways – depending on the weapon you use. When I use my rocket launcher on some poor defenseless townsperson, he’ll know (and his neighbors will be cleaning up the blood for weeks!)


 * This is the wasteland. Life is cheap and violence is all that there is.  We are going to grab the player’s guts and remind him of this. ***

That vision statement was written with management, marketing and sales in mind. It was never intended to be released to the public, nor was it written at the end of the project -- things changed.

And here's another sample:

'''And Finally,

'''14. The team is motivated (Tim has incriminating documents on all of us) '''This is extremely important. Team GURPS is excited to be making this game. Everyone on the team is happy with what they are doing. We want to do this. We care about this game and we will make it cool.

-Team GURPS

The Vision Doc definitely pre-dated the SPECIALization of Fallout. There was also a US vs. THEM competition between us and the D&D projects (the Fallout dev team felt like red-headed step children after Interplay acquired the D&D license, no offense to red-headed step children.) So we wrote some docs for Interplay management with a neener-neener kind of attitude.

Frankly, I think it's neat the FO3 team quoted it. What a blast from the past."

- Chris Taylor