'Briosafreak'

::Introductions::

1. 'Briosafreak' is a well known pseudonym in the world of Fallout fandom. In respect to Fallout, what are you involved in right now, and what have you been involved in the past?

I’m the Site Director of Planet Fallout, a new fansite from Gamespy/IGN, and developed and run alone the Fallout 3: A Post Nuclear Blog, a very tiresome but rewarding project that will be put on hold when the game is released; I also helped to run No Mutants Allowed in 2003, the Van Buren days, as we call it.

2. How were you introduced to Fallout? What is it about Fallout that has inspired you (and others) to years of dedicated following? Why is it special in comparison to other games?

Through the Fallout demo, on a PCFormat coverdisc, years ago. I liked the visual style of the thing, but it worked awfully in my poor old computer of the time, and only later, in 99, I got back to the series through Fallout 2 first, then Fallout. My first kid was sick at the time, Fallout 2 helped me to go through many sleepless nights.

I started following the development of Fallout: Tactics on the Interplay message boards and NMA, and the more I played the games the more I got hooked with the incredible replayability and the way choices and consequences were dealt. The retro futuristic visuals and the writing also helped, a lot!

Also I grew attached to the community, although I sometimes had to spend a few months outside that world, for work or family reasons, but I would always came back. V13 and the crazyness among clans, DAC as a small message board or a big PlanetFallout (the original) venture, and NMA and all that knowledge and roughness, I saw it all and felt strangely comfortable. I remember when NMA was without news for a few days because NATO was bombing parts of Belgrade next to Miroslav’s house, or when the V13 boss convinced all major fansites to create a large portal for Fallout:Tactics mods, that never went up.

When you spend 9/11 at NMA making sure people are alright, or you follow the revolution that led to the end of the Milosevic regime watching the owner of NMA in the middle of the confusion and shots, then you understand that you have a special bond to that community.

The Fallout community at large is many times rowdy, but it’s like in many families, there’s a lot of noise but we still feel at home.

3. As an adult gamer very actively involved in the field, what is the attitude of your 'real-life' acquaintances towards your interest in Fallout? Do you think there is a good level of understanding, or people still see it as something of a 'kid/nerd' thing, in your
experience?

Gaming is a private side that I don’t share with my acquaintances, in general. Most of the guys that would play games with me in 80’s and 90’s don’t have the time to do so now, or just play casual MMORPGs, or maybe the Sims… My older kid is a devoted gamer, so it’s something that helped in creating some healthy father/son bonding. He’s very interested in the Fallout games, but his mother says he’s too young to play them, so…

There're also some very nice FO fan art around. This one's from defonten.

::Fallout Fans::

4. As someone who's 'been around the block' in terms of Fallout fandom, how would you describe Fallout fans as a whole? (Yes, I know that we can't think of them as one group, but I'm sure you have your own categories in mind.)

Oh so many categories. You have the devoted and incredibly tech savy Russian fans, the gigantic number of Polish fans that cover all spectrums of gaming in Poland, the modders from other countries that don’t get all the attention they deserve, the old school roleplayers, either with a P&P background or that come from early CRPGs, the new waves of fans that show up with the almost yearly budget releases of the classic games, the people in small isolated groups and those that go to everywhere and want to know everything about the game, old BIS followers, old Troika followers, new Bethsoft fans, the GameFaq kids, the casual fans that show up for a brief time or once every year… there are just so many categories and crossed links between those groups that would be impossible to name them all.

So diversity is an important word, as resilience. That’s the most important feature of Fallout fans as a whole, they are incredibly resilient to time and adversities.

5. The Fallout fan community is naturally very old, and there’s a lot of history, a lot of culture. Can this be intimidating or alienating for newcomers? Can this strong sense of community have a negative side-effect in that sense?

It can, it’s hard to stay in the first weeks in places like NMA without having problems here and there. But with budget versions being released every year, and piracy still rampant, new “generations” are coming on a yearly basis, so the community really “never gets old”.

6. What kind of impact do/did Fallout fans have on the production of Fallout, whether with Interplay or now with Bethesda? Do you think they've been able to influence the way the franchise has gone/is going?

The way they followed the original is still available in the old newsgroups, but much of the FO2 data seems to have been lost forever.

The Interplay message boards during the Tactics days was a great loud party, with the AtheistsforChrisT (as in Chris Taylor) like Killzig or JC causing all sorts of trouble, Saint_Proverbius making some great posts, and the Baldurs Gate and Fallout fans always picking at each other.

The devs interacted with the fans there, and lobbying was made in the fansites. There was a bit of a lack of informal channels though, that caused many misunderstandings, a lesson I learned it should be avoided in the future.

Later, and after two cancellations of the development of Fallout 3,that were kept in secret, the fans were tired of waiting.

A community rose on the BIS forum, with many elements hostile to Fallout fans, since they couldn’t understand that they were getting all the medieval fantasy games they wanted while Fallout fans were exasperating.

When the Interplay Forum replaced the BIS forum there was enough hostility between Interplay and some Icewind Dale and BG fans on one side, and Fallout fans in general on the other, for things to explode at the slightest problem. I remember threatening a BIS dev that I would go through the ocean and hit him repeatedly with a hammer… now we’re still good friends though, he’s an excellent man and great Fallout fan.

So when the first posts about Van Buren appeared, Odin, who was running NMA at the time and me talked and decided to follow two lines of action: we would give an impartial coverage of the game on one side, and tried to come up ways to build bridges between BIS and the Interplay forum people and the hardcore Fallout fans.

Van Buren, about five years ago.

Trying to do the coverage met some resistance in a few quarters of the fandom, weary of everything Interplay by then, because of the way it was decided to make and push FO:BOS, but creating those bridges was even harder. In the end I think we had a high degree of success, several members of the forum are now in high positions at DAC and NMA, and we remain in touch with many former BIS devs.

Besides using the Tactics approach of using the forum to talk to the devs directly, informal second tier channels were setup, making the misunderstandings much easier to resolve.

We also divided roles: RPGCodex would be the place to be completely negative, since Saint_Proverbius knew since July 2003 people at Interplay management were trying to boycott the game anyway, and he didn’t like a few BIS guys personally; with the same knowledge Killzig from DAC left the community run its course, with mostly negative positions, since he didn’t want people to be disappointed if things got a sour end, but at the same time remained in touch with BIS devs and was rooting for something good to come out of it; and we at NMA worked the most we could to give visibility to the project, in order to make it harder for Interplay to cancel it.

Well the game was indeed cancelled, and BIS was shut down (thanks for nothing Jim Molitor and Herve Caen), the devs came to the topic we started at NMA, a thing that still fills me with pride, and we mourned and made plans to the future.

I left after that, Fallout fans helped to kill FO:BOS commercially, with bad word of mouth, and NMA continued with what amounts almost to investigative reporting about Interplay and the future of the Fallout franchise.

Fallout fans did participate a lot in all of these situations, but without much success. That makes a person more bitter than usual, which brings me to the next question. Editor's Note: Question 8, in fact.

7. Your explanation about communities 'dividing up roles' for Van Buren is very interesting and surprising for me. It seems that there was a deliberate effort to construct a balanced environment for the discussion on Van Buren, instead of communities simply going wherever the flow takes them. What made you and others go down such a route?

Many discussions, mainly on #fallout, or ICQ. After a while we just divided roles naturally, no one was forced to do so. There was a need for moving things, in one way or another, and after a lot of discussions we just knew what to do and how to do it. There are a lot of bright guys in the community too, that love a good discussion and to fight to make a stand, so again it was a natural process. We would disagree among ourselves a lot, but kept the information flowing, we needed each other for that. One night Killzig would be on messenger with someone at BIS, Saint_Proverbius would be on a private chat with someone from middle management at Interplay or a Troika dev, and I would be with some anonymous or not so anonymous source at BIS and some media guy. We worked for our own agenda, individually, but kept the info flowing, so everyone would win by adding layers of knowledge to allow all of us to get the best picture, and therefore staying on top of things, regardless of our differences.

Information is the key asset in any community.