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Fallout IP Sold to Bethesda Softworks

Posted by Zonk on from the sweet-jumping-nuclear-radition dept.

In what I can only see as good news, the Fallout IP has been sold to Bethesda Softworks. A long, long time ago simoniker posted that Bethesda was licensing the IP from Interplay; as of earlier this month, they now own it lock, stock, and barrel. Gamasutra reports: "According to the filing, first spotted by Fallout fansite No Mutants Allowed, the purchase of the Fallout license and accompanying IP was settled on April 9th of this year, with final payment installments expected to be delivered by the third quarter of this year ... In an interesting twist, as part of the agreement Interplay now acts as a licensee of the IP as it continues to ramp up production on its own Fallout-themed massively multiplayer game, first announced in 2004 alongside Bethesda's sequel, and shown via internal documents as recently as December to have a projected $75 million dollar budget and launch date of 2010."

1 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As long as they make fallout 3 by Razed+By+TV · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's that second part that worries me. Let me direct you to a snippet of an interview with Peter Hines of Bethesda.

    SPOnG: One of the things that crops up a lot in reviews and discussions of about Fallout is that a lot of the fans like the about Fallout humour. What does this mean to you?

    Pete Hines: Well, Todd Howard (Executive Producer at Bethesda) has talked a little about this. We're not big fans of jokes... developers that try to tell jokes, it tends not to work very well. You know, the humour in Fallout 3 is that you can get a weapon and blow a guy to a bloody mess, then when you pull up your interface, you see a little smiling cartoon character holding his thumb up. Like that's funny... funny not in terms of jokes or winks at the camera and such...
    The humor of Fallout is far more than just "a little smiling cartoon" telling you that you did a-okay with that SMG. It involves sarcasm, irony, coincidence, dark humor, and Monty Python references. Hines's answer suggests that they are going to stray far from the established norm, and not in a good way.

    Just for the record, that part of the interview can be found here:
    http://spong.com/detail/editorial.jsp?eid=10109516 &cid=&tid=&pid=&plid=&page=4