Fallout was created by a team at Interplay Entertainment that was later spun off into Black Isle Studios. Black Isle handled Fallout 2, but were largely staffed by new writers and designers who hadn't worked on the previous game, who gave the game its (in)famous comedic tone and treasure trove of pop-culture references and parodies.
Fallout 3 was in development by Black Isle for years under the codename "Van Buren", but the financial troubles at Interplay caused it to be scrapped. The series was then sold to Bethesda, who made their own version of Fallout 3 that was more of a Soft Reboot than a sequel, set in an entirely disparate location with a new gameplay style and no returning factions or characters besides the Enclave and the Brotherhood (and even they are different branches that differ significantly from their counterparts in the previous games).
The follow-up, the Obsidian-made Fallout: New Vegas, would be a straight example, filling a blank spot on the release schedule while Bethesda worked on Skyrim and Fallout 4... except that Obsidian hired several ex-Black-Isle devs to make it, and they reused several concepts from Project Van Buren. As a result, while it kept 3's gameplay style, it returns to the setting and factions of the originals and the story is more of a direct sequel to the previous games than the actual Fallout 3 was.
Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: A rather hilarious example, as some dubious journalists saw a Fallout 3 promo shot of a ruined Washington, D.C., without a watermark and assumed it was created by terrorists as a warning. Seriously.
Demand Overload: Not for the games themselves, but the Game Mods, following rising interest in the series in the wake of the success of the show on Amazon Prime. The website hosting the mods Nexus Mods ending up slowing down to a crawl a one point due to the demand for mods for various Fallout games.
'Med-X', which provides damage reduction, was originally called 'morphine'. As laws in Australia prohibited video games from depicting real drugs as power-ups, it was renamed.
Franchise Ownership Acquisition: The Fallout franchise was originally owned by Interplay and Black Isle Studios before Bethesda bought the rights to the intellectual property from the former in 2007. Microsoft's purchase of Zenimax, Bethesda's parent company, in 2021 now in turn makes Microsoft the owners of the Fallout IP.
Long Runner: The series has had five main games (1, 2, New Vegas, 3, and 4), three spin-off games (Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel, and 76), and thirteen story-based DLC campaignsnote Broken Steel, Point Lookout, The Pitt, Operation Anchorage, and Mothership Zeta for 3; Honest Hearts, Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road for New Vegas; and finally Far Harbor, Nuka-World, Vault-Tec Workshop, and Automatron for 4. since 1997, and is still ongoing as of 2022.
Keep Circulating the Tapes/Screwed by the Lawyers: As part of the fallout of the legal battles between Interplay and Bethesda regarding the games, Interplay took the games they produced off of GoG.com and Steam, at least until the games' copyrights reverted to Bethesda after the final settlement. Then they soon returned to Steam and later GoG.
Originally, Fallout was going to be based on a licensed version of the paper RPG GURPS, from Steve Jackson Games, and would have published under the name Vault 13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure. But due to disagreements, including Steve Jackson disliking the appearance of Vault Boy on the character creation screen, and the execution of the insurgent from the intro, the deal was called off. Instead, Black Isle thought up the SPECIAL system, which has been used in every Fallout game ever since.
Fallout was going to have a film adaptation.
In Junktown of Fallout, the player can make the good choice of siding with the mayor Killian Darkwater against the greedy casino-owner Gizmo. If the player sides with the former, the town becomes a bastion of law and order. If he sides with the latter, it becomes a Wretched Hive. Originally, this was the other way around: The mayor runs the place into the ground with tyrannical laws and hanging half the population. The casino owner turns the place into a slightly seedy, but otherwise safe and pleasant place to live. The publishers objected to this and the endings got semi-switched.
The first Fallout 3, aka Fallout: Van Buren, could have lived even after Black Isle died. Had they not been outbid by Bethesda, Fallout 3 would have been made by none other than Black Isle alumni developers Troika Games, creators of Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Several ideas from Van Buren would eventually be implemented in Fallout: New Vegas, though with changes to reflect the later time period. One of the most notable is Joshua Graham, the Burned Man - in Van Buren he was to be the "Hanged Man" instead, the first and statistically strongest companion available to the player, but also an extremely angry individual who was likely to piss off anyone and everyone else you came across. A group of fans hope to recreate Van Buren as it was originally envisioned.
Supposedly, the person first considered for the role of Fallout 3's President John Henry Eden was none other than Bill Clinton. An early version of the character was also meant to be the consciousness of President Richardson from Fallout 2 uploaded into a computer.
A Fallout top-down shooter was being developed for the PlayStation by Interplay, and was being developed at the same time as a PlayStation port of Baldur's Gate.
Brotherhood of Steel 2 was in the works. Interplayloved this one so much that they cancelled Fallout: Van Buren to make the sequel. However, thanks to poor sales, Brotherhood of Steel 2didn't get made either. Interestingly, when the design documentation was made public in 2009, it revealed it would have used concepts from both Van Buren and the cancelled Tactics sequel.
Fallout Tactics 2 would have taken place in Florida and the Southeastern USA, and concerned an irradiated, faulty GECK creating powerful, man-eating mutant plantlife that threatened to overwhelm the barren (but inhabitable) deserts. Stated influences included The Day of the Triffids and Doctor Who's "The Seeds Of Doom," and the designers said they were determined to avoid the flaws of the first game. The Central Theme would have been the moral ambiguity of "man versus nature."
Gareth Davies: My favorite aspect of the theme was the idea that you essentially have nature doing its thing and rapidly rejuvenating the desert wastes, but those wacky humans feel the need to oppose it because they don't like the idea of becoming fertilizer.
Dan Levin: Actually, when I moved from 14 Degrees East to Shiny Ent. I pitched a sequel to that ending but never had a chance since Interplay sold off Shiny to another publisher. The first movie storyboard was a Brotherhood raid on the Mutant Liberation Army which included mass executions.
Fallout Extreme was going to be a squad based first-person and third-person tactical shooter on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox using the Unreal engine.
Fallout Online was to be developed by Interplay. The rights were transferred to Bethesda, and it was eventually cancelled in 2012.
Prior to the iOS/Android Fallout Shelter, John Carmack proposed a Fallout game for the iPhone.
Fallout: New Vegas originally allowed you to continue playing after the main quest, with some new sidequests and dialogue even being opened up. This was unfortunately ditched for the final product, as the wide variation in potential endings, coupled with the limited development time, made it an unrealistic proposition for Obsidian.
Fallout 4 had a myriad of content cut. Most of these were sidequests that Bethesda likely ran out of time or patience to develop. Judging by leftover assets, one mission was going to send the player to the bottom of the sea in a diving suit to fight a sea monster in a Bioshock-inspired vault. Another major piece of cut content was the Combat Zone. It shares a similar story to the Windhelm Pit from Skyrim: It was to be an arena where the player could bet on NPC fights or join the fights themselves. This was scrapped late in development and the Combat Zone was re-purposed into just another raider dungeon, but enough of the assets were leftover (including some scripts and all of the dialogue) to enable modders to restore it.
Tim Cain's Youtube channel describes a lot of the philosophy and concepts behind the original idea that Interplay had for the Fallout franchise that are no longer seemingly relevant to the direction Bethesda has taken the Fallout universe — such as the fact that Vault-Tec and the Enclave's motives were a lot more well-intentioned earlier with the Vaults overall being far more benign in their experimentsnote All the Vaults were designed (in the Interplay era) for the idea of understanding how humans could survive the conditions needed for a generational spaceship so they can start over on another world and learn from the mistakes that nearly wiped the human race to begin with than the sociopathic For Science! route later Vaults in the Bethesda era would go for that would paint them as genuinely evil in the eyes of the setting.
Word of Saint Paul: The Fallout Universe Bible put together by Chris Avellone. It's canonicity is debated, but it is still used as reference material by the franchise's new owners. Some fans generally consider it "canon until contradicted in-game" although Bethesda has not given a definitive answer on if it is canon or not.
