Trivia / Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

• Adored by the Network: This game got Fallout: Van Buren delayed. Fans were displeased. Interplay's response? Put a snarky Take That, Audience! message into the credits^note "Thanks For the Laughs," followed by the URLs of the two largest Fallout fan forums of the time, whose users had bashed the game and outright cancel the Fallout: Van Buren version of Fallout 3 to make a Brotherhood of Steel 2... which, thanks to Interplay's subsequent financial issues, also got cancelled.
• Creator Backlash: Many developers of the newer Fallout games hate this one just as much as the fans do, if not more. There's a reason the game was struck from canon.
  Fred Zeleny:^note Quest designer on Fallout 3 I don't know if I'll ever feel fully clean again. I so wanted it to be good, because it had been so very long since a good Fallout game. Nowadays, I keep the disc around solely to focus all of my hatred and scorn into it. But I try not to actually touch it, lest its fundamental badness rub off on me.
• Creator Killer: Interplay was already halfway out the door by the time it finished production on the game, causing them to lay off almost the entire production team the moment it was finished, but poor sales helped to put the final nail in the company's coffin.
• Dummied Out: The Instakill Pistol. Functionally and cosmetically identical to the Beretta, it would have done 1000-1001 damage per shot, killing any enemy with a single shot. It was likely only there as a development tool, as such a pistol that wiped out any enemy with a single shot using the most common ammunition in the game would be a massive Game-Breaker.
• Franchise Killer: This game marked the end of Interplay's run on the Fallout series, and in fact, it would take over four years until another Fallout game in general came out, that game being Fallout 3.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Unlike the other Interplay-era Fallout games, Brotherhood Of Steel has yet to receive a rerelease in any form from current rights holder Bethesda. Considering the game’s poor reception among both fans and Bethesda (who declared the game non-canon), this is unlikely to change.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Harold, who was voiced by Charlie Adler in the first two games, is now voiced by Alan Oppenheimer, who makes no attempt to sound like Harold did in the original games.
  • Rhombus is now voiced by John Vernon instead of Clancy Brown. Yes, that John Vernon.
• Recycled Script: The final act of the game is more or less this for the ending of Fallout 1 - you have a sinister cult (whose leader is an obvious stand-in for the Lieutenant, voiced by the same voice actor, no less.) guarding a secret vault where a super mutant army is planning to Take Over the World, and you, an outsider who recently joined the Brotherhood of Steel, have to single-handedly stop them.
• Similarly Named Works: Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel has an almost identical title, with only "Tactics" separating the two; as a result, people will use "Fallout Tactics" to refer to the former game, while "Brotherhood of Steel" is used to refer to this game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A Brotherhood of Steel 2 was in the works. Of course, Interplay loved this one so much that they cancelled Fallout: Van Buren to make the sequel. However, thanks to poor sales, Brotherhood of Steel 2 didn'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.
  • Harold's original character model omitted the tree in his head. Workers on the game had to lobby vociferously for that continuity detail to be honored before the game's release.

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