Fallout Bible 9 interview with Jesse Heinig

1. Introduce yourself. Who the hell are you?

I'm Jess Heinig. That's what it says on the interview section, right? This thing has a header, doesn't it? Or are you some kind of slack bastard?

I lurched into game design with Fallout, then moved on to spend about three and a half years Gothing it up at White Wolf. Most recently I've slouched my way back to California to work for Decipher on the Star Trek roleplaying game. This means that I get to visit the Paramount studio lot, and therefore, that I am inherently an alpha-geek.

2. How did someone like YOU start working on Fallout?

Desperation.

No, not me, Interplay.

In short, Fallout was still GURPS back in the day. I knew GURPS. I was working computer science stuff in college. I wrote a short character generation program in C++ and showed it to Tim Cain (the project developer).

I correctly declared int main(void) instead of void main(void) in my main function. I got a job.

3. Yeah, yeah, but what did you do on Fallout?

Things and... stuff. Mostly things that gave you experience, or henchmen, or information. Things such as the scripting of characters in Vault 13, Junktown, Adytum, the Glow, and the Military Base. Random encounters. If it was in one of those areas and it talked to you, shot at you or wandered around, I probably wrote some or all of the script that made it do what it did. All of the party members -- although we weren't really set up to have party members...

4. What was you most favorite thing, area, or item that you worked on in Fallout?

ZAX, the pseudo-intelligent computer in the Glow, was my favorite little baby. That came from an ancient, yellowed design document for an early draft of Fallout that was found in a chest guarded by an orc, or something. There was a throw-away reference to a computer that held a conversation with the character, so I wrote one up. The name ZAX was, of course, an homage to c:wasteland:VAX, the humanform robot of Wasteland.

A close second in favorites was the party members. The engine didn't really have support for party members, and the dev team didn't have much of an incentive to add them (nor did anyone think that it was feasible). I wrote up a script for Ian, THEN I showed it to Tim Cain. Eight million bugs later, we had "functional" party members who would shoot you in the back.

5. What was your least favorite thing, area, or item that you worked on in Fallout?

The bugs.

Seriously. The worst part about the bugs were the core code bugs.

Sometimes there were function calls that didn't work right and crashed the game. If this happened in your script, then you'd get the blame... even if it was a function that you hadn't written, had no access to, and couldn't fix. No choice then but to put the programmer in a headlock and force code out of him* like squeezing the juice from a rancid turnip.

Oh yeah. There was also this little bit of having one of the characters use the word "Oriental" in reference to another character. Sure, in the modern day and age we enlightened people say "Asian." For some reason though this little bit of PC was forced into the game text as well. Why a character in the game can't be un-PC, or just plain wrong, I don't know. Especially when the game allows you to push drugs on kids until they die, and then blow up their corpses with dynamite. You can't say "Oriental"? WTF?

• For those who presume that I am being sexist by assuming the male pronoun in my English, may I point out that there were no female programmers on Fallout 1's team.
  

6. Any secrets or background stuff that you've been keeping in your noggin that you want to share?

If you have a character with a 10 Intelligence, there is a vanishingly small chance to best ZAX in chess. This is a doomed experiment for you, though. It will take you so long to finally win that your Rad-X will have worn off. You'll stand up from the chess game and then keel over dead from megadoses of radiation in the Glow. Some days, I am an evil man.

As far as background secrets, I didn't have the chance to put in many easter eggs... except, of course, for the obligatory pop culture references that became so common that one was actually worth experience in Fallout 2. Tycho (the party member) was, as his background implies, a desert ranger -- another throwback to Wasteland. Oh yeah. In an earlier version of the Glow, there were two little nearly-hidden things... not sure if they made the final cut; I haven't played the game in a while. Behind one of the broken goo-filled suspension tanks was a body of a big-headed alien. Near that was a desk with a note on it. The note had about every third letter taken out, but if you puzzled out what it said, you could figure out that it was an evacuation notice, signed by Dana Scully.

7. Was there anything you created that didn't make it in?

See the aforementioned bit about the Glow...

In conjunction with a couple of the folks in QA, I worked out some ideas for maps and quests based on early design documentation. Fallout's design docs were really constantly evolving, and sometimes a given iteration of the documents would just have a big hole and you'd have to go back to earlier copies to find notes and rough ideas for an area. There were originally going to be two other raider tribes in addition to the Khans -- the Vipers and some other group whose name escapes me. We had this idea worked out for the Vipers being in a cleft in a canyon with some beat-up wagons or motor homes, and a sort of snake-worship-cult thing going on. There was gonna be a quest where you could become an honorary Viper and go through their pit of serpents and gain the Snakeater perk for free. Sadly, we just didn't have time to actually build the map.

I also championed long and hard for a different version of the Boneyard, but I was not really a senior staffer, and Leonard Boyarsky had a specific idea in mind that evolved into the final cut. The maps would've been similar but a lot of the story for that area would've been quite different.

8. Any personal stories you want to share from the development process?

Well, there was the whole thing about being at least 18 to blow the Master...

The tentacles, you know...

I remember learning the virtue of TESTING. I had finally figured out how to set up external variables in the scripts, and I'd managed to weasel the other Jesse (the programmer) into coding them in the engine. As a result we suddenly had the ability to make one item affect another. A bunch of the team had been pounding their heads for literally WEEKS over the problem of just figuring out how to make it so that using the Vault computer terminal on the outside of Vault-13 would cause the Vault door to open, since they were two separate objects. I figured out how to make the external variables link, coded a script, and ran to get Leonard Boyarsky. Foolish me, as I had not copied the script to the override file... that is, I wrote all the stuff to make it go, then forgot to put it in the right place. Boy did I look stupid when I said "I've got it!", clicked the button, and the character walked over, fiddled with the door computer, and nothing happened.

"Boy was my face red!" as they say in the biz.

My other memorable moment was deciding to make the bounty hunter group for the child-killers. We had debated heatedly the merits of having child-killing in the game versus not having child-killing, and I was a proponent of consequence-driven gaming -- if you screw up, you suffer the consequences; if you kill children, then people get so incensed that they hire bounty hunters to come after you. Of course, I lovingly named the lead bounty hunter Avellone in honor of Chris Avellone, the most humorous designer at Interplay.

9. If you had one inventory item from Fallout, what would it be?

The POWER FIST! I would smash righteous fury down upon the heads of evildoers and jaywalkers with Minsc-like ferocity!

Or, did you mean, is there any particular inventory item that I feel responsible for? In that case, also the power fist. While playing through the game with an Unarmed Combat/Speech character I concluded that you just couldn't dish out the damage to get past enemies in the endgame, even with Unarmed Combat of 200%, More Criticals, Better Criticals, and a lot of called shots. So, I lobbied for "unarmed combat enhancers," from which we gained the spiked knuckles and the power fist. (Mostly I think it was just because I kept saying "Power Fist" over and over again to Feargus until he finally just caved in and had them put into the game.)

10. What are you doing now? What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

These days I reside in Los Angeles and I work for Decipher studios on the Star Trek roleplaying game. We just put out a new core game, thanks to the wacky license changeovers of the last couple years. Current projects include working on some of the backlist sourcebooks like the Star Trek Aliens and Starships books. I nearly smacked into Jolene Blalock (T'Pol on Enterprise) about two weeks ago, which would have been very bad because she is not a large woman by any means and I would have crushed her. I doubt that Paramount would've been happy with me bruising up their resident Vulcan.

I'm hoping to leverage my Star Trek work into writing for the shows and movies. Not only would that be enjoyable, but I could make some REAL money.

(And I couldn't possibly do worse than some of the novels already out there.)

11. What question do you wish you had been asked about Fallout that wasn't in this list of questions?

"What was it like working with the Fallout team?"

(You don't get off that easy, though. If you wanna know the answer, you have to actually ask.)

12. If you had one wish, what would it be?

Right now? Since I'm in a Fallout-y mood from this questionnaire, it would be for the completion of Fallout 3, that all the computer gaming world could share in the joy that is more Fallout.

Or the best sandwich EVER. I have had some really good sandwiches but the best one ever would be really nice right now.

13. Is there anything you've ever wanted to say in an interview that you've never had the chance to say?

FIGHT CENSORSHIP! DOWN WITH THE MAN!

Junktown was a pretty schizophrenic place because Chris T. had sent over a design doc that had the basic Gizmo/ Killian conflict, but almost everything else was unfinished. I would get some general outlines from him and then fill them in. For instance, "There should be a gang conflict between the bartender and some gang" turned into the whole gang story arc with the bowling trophy and Sherry and whatnot. I scripted in Dogmeat, but it was Chris T. who originally came up with the design idea.

Didja know... in the original write-up of Junktown, the "ending sequence" was reversed from its current incarnation. That is, in the endgame slideshow, if the player had favored Killian, the original write-up was something like "With Gizmo out of the way, Killian enforces his brand of frontier justice on Junktown. The city remains orderly but small, as travelers steer away from his rigid sensibilities," and the picture background behind Killian was a gallows with shadows of dead men hanging from it. If the player favored Gizmo, it was "Under Gizmo's leadership, Junktown becomes a trading center and resort, where people come from miles around to gamble, spend money and enjoy themselves in relative safety. Gizmo keeps the town prosperous but healthy, as he has no desire to injure his own affluence. The inhabitants of the town become wealthy and famous," with the background picture showing Junktown as a Reno-like casino with electricity and clean streets free of any drug dealers or riff-raff who might endanger Gizmo's operations. Marketing decided at the last minute that we had to "reward good and punish bad," though, so the sequence was changed to its current incarnation.

Seems kinda out of place, doesn't he? He's the descendant of an Americanized Celtic family who has a strong vibe to keep his "ethnic heritage" alive. To do so he maintains lineages of Celtic music, food, clothing -- you name it. Never mind that who knows if England still exists at all... among other things, he's a storyteller and a collector of history. While telling tales of the rest of the world was really outside the scope of the game (and it would've been really boring for the player to wade through pages of history-through-a-Celtic-lens), his expertise meant that he could rub off a little on the character in matters of jokes, tale-telling and singing -- the sorts of things that help with Charisma.

Tycho's a nod to the desert rangers of Wasteland. Obviously that "history" didn't wind up in Fallout, so that makes it more of an homage than anything.

Originally, the idea is that he came from east of California, in the Nevada area. His family comes from people who survived the devastation when WAR happened, likely living among the badlands of Nevada. As I envisaged it, Tycho learned a lot about desert survival and whatnot from his small community, which kept a strong survivalist contingent -- so they still had some small arms and books. They probably had something like the cliff-dwelling Indians going on for their town, though I never fleshed it out.

Anyway, Tycho took off to wandering the desert with traders and explorers for several years, returning from time to time with goods or maps. Most likely he started with small trips and went further abroad as he became more experienced. He went as far as the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and then headed back west. Eventually he wound up on the west coast as a long-range explorer from a loose group of desert rangers whose actual origins, scope and purpose weren't defined.

In some ways Tycho is reminiscent of master Yuta from "Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds." He carries a gas mask just in case, wears hardened leather armor, has a knife, knuckles, canteen, all the usual survival gear. I'd pictured him as this guy in leather armor (Fallout-style) with a gas mask hanging around his neck, goggles (to keep out sand and glare), a sand-colored cloak usable for camouflage and to keep the sun off, and a double-barreled shotgun.