Here’s what that tech demo represented, quoted by designer J.E. Swayer at the Fallout fansite No Mutants Allowed:

The demo was a segment of what was going to be the F3 tutorial. The tutorial was supposed to be an “educational film” called “After the Bombs Fall: Moving into Your New Vault”. In it, you played a young woman who comes home with her brother to find that her parents were wasted by Commie insurgents. The bombs are starting to fall, and you and your brother have to make your way to a vault with the help of GMC Cpl. Armstrong. It would have taught you how to move, look at your character sheet, use the world map, fight, etc.

The segments in the demo are the last two portions of the tutorial, obviously with the “real” F3 Protagonist-type character instead of vault younglings.

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A few years earlier, design documents for Van Buren also leaked, revealing the game’s would have ultimately asked players to make some sickening decisions about who should live or die in the wasteland. While trying to stop the missiles from wiping the remants of humanity from off the map, it becomes clear you can’t stop all the missiles. Thus, the player must choose where the missiles land.

...yikes.

Van Buren designer Chris Avellone, who co-founded Obsidian Entertainment and most recently contributed to pits crowdfunded RPG Pillars of Eternity, revealed new details about the game during a recent talk in New York City.

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For example, the plan was to have you deal with another rogue group—one very much like your own—that was going around making decisions in the wasteland.

Here’s how Polygon described it in their writeup:

Some of the notable elements Avellone shared included that your protagonist, an accused criminal, traveled with a team of companions whose decisions affected the other inhabitants of the in-game world. While the game did not offer multiplayer, the player’s team would begin to see the ramifications of the other team’s decision-making, which was controlled by the game’s AI, Avellone explained.

For the purposes of his paper playtest, he had two separate teams of six fellow developers serve as the two sets of characters. Avellone would implement the effects of choices made by each group into the other’s gameplay session unbeknownst to them. In that sense, the tabletop version of Fallout 3: Van Buren became a tacitly competitive game in which you were actually fighting against another team to prevent or inflict further damage upon your world.

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Though Van Buren was never completed, Avellone was given another chance to play around in the Fallout universe when Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas, and some ideas made it over, such as the slave-focused faction Caesar’s Legion.

Here’s how they were conceptualized for Van Buren, per the Fallout Wikia page:

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And here’s how they looked in New Vegas:

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(The way that quest concluded is one of my favorite moments in New Vegas.)

Van Buren was cancelled in 2003, with Interplay drifting into debt. Looking for a way out, they licensed the option to develop Fallout 3 to Bethesda Softworks for $1.17 million. Then, in 2007, Bethesda bought the Fallout property for $5.75 million. Bethesda didn’t totally own the brand, however, with Interplay still allowed to sell earlier games in the series and a chance to develop a Fallout MMO. Though in development for several years, the MMO fell apart and Bethesda gained all rights—including the old games—at the end of 2013.

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There’s lots more out there, too. If you want to dive deeper, you can download the tech demo at No Mutants Allowed and the Wikia page is a terrific resource.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

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That Actually Happened is a weekly series at Kotaku in which we highlight interesting moments in gaming history. So far, we’ve revisited when Sonic kissed a human, a live game show on Xbox 360, and Sony throwing a God of War party with a dead goat. If you have any suggestions for future entires, please let us know in the comments below!

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