Tim Kane, one of the developers of the original Fallout, was initially unsure about the game’s reverse theft system.
Now this seems obvious and we take it for granted, for example, in Baldur’s Gate 3, where players found the funniest exploit with throwing items, but the ability to throw something into an NPC’s inventory appeared in the first Fallout almost by accident. As Kane said in an interview Rock Paper Shotgun, this system used the same interface as trading. This “automatically allowed items to be placed” in NPC inventories.
Tim goes on to describe how one of the test team’s favorite pastimes was throwing armfuls of dynamite at NPCs using this reverse theft.
At first, Kane and the other developers were a little worried about such a system. It certainly allows the player to take a slightly more aggressive approach to the game. But then they decided:
It’s fun. This is a ready-made game mechanic, why not? Why can’t you set a timer for 60 seconds, put explosives in someone’s backpack, and sneak out?
The interview goes on to explain how developer Interplay decided to put this new feature to the test by adding a mission that requires the player to surreptitiously plant a listening device on a casino manager in order to spy on him later. It showed that stealth stealing can be used for more than just blowing poor NPCs to pieces.
This discovery is just one of many that led Kane to create a living, responsive gaming world.
I didn’t want a lot to be written into the script. I didn’t want everyone to have the same gaming experience. To do this, we simply had to create rules and let those rules take the player wherever they led, rather than hard-and-fast.
The original Fallout came out back in 1997, but since then we’ve seen plenty of other reactive open worlds and branching stories with plenty of options depending on the player’s actions in many of the best RPGs of all years. However, it is always good to remember the roots. So the next time you commit atrocities against NPCs by throwing something terrible at them like a bomb in Baldur’s Gate 3, just remember to thank Tim Kane and Interplay for being one of the first to come up with and embodied this idea.
