Fallout: New Vegas director thought 2003 studio closure that took down the original Fallout 3 and Baldur's Gate 3 teams meant he'd never get to work on the RPG series again
Apr. 24, 2024Josh Sawyer was project lead on Codename Van Buren
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RPG expert Josh Sawyer is the director behind Fallout: New Vegas, often considered the best Fallout game. But long before he brought Obisidan’s take on the post-apocalypse to life, he thought he’d blown his one and only chance to make a Fallout game.
In an interview withRock Paper Shotgun, Sawyer discussed his time at the original developers of Fallout, Black Isle Studios. Black Isle was hugely successful in the 1990s, creating some of the best CRPGs of all time, including Baldur’s Gate 3’s D&D precursors, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment.
The studio’s owner, Interplay, was still reeling, and Sawyer eventually resigned from the company. In doing so, he seemed to have lost his “dream” of making a Fallout: “losing that hurt.”
That project, which was known internally as Van Buren, is unlikely to ever see the light of day. Sawyer would go on to attempt to makea Fallout TTRPG that eventually found its way into the Fallout TV showand finally to direct Fallout: New Vegas. After that, he helped create Pillars of Eternity, but even that wasn’t an entirely happy ending,time pressure forcing Sawyer to make far more extreme demands of his staff than he was happy with. At least for his attempts to work on Fallout, however, the third time did prove to be the charm.
For a moment, Fallout: New Vegas fans thought they’d found evidence of sequel plans, only to find Josh Sawyer’s burrito order instead.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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