Before the Bethesda Fallouts, and after the Black Isle originals, came a singular series offshoot—Fallout: Tactics. A slightly offbeat spinoff made by an inexperienced team, who had to reverse-engineer from the source material, Tactics would release in 2001 to a fairly decent critical reception, but got the cold shoulder from many fans. 

Jeremy Peel recently spoke to Tactics’ lead designer Ed Orman, in a wide-ranging PCG interview revealing more about the game than ever before. One of the oddities of working on it was that dual reaction, with all the praise soon undercut by fans livid about things like the hairy deathclaws.

“We had two windows into how it was being received,” says Orman. “There was one that we should have just never looked through, and the one that we always look through. Commercially and in terms of how [Fallout: Tactics] was rated and how it was reviewed, it was received really well. For what it was, the journalists who played it just generally seemed to get what we were trying to do, what the limitations of what we had were, and they thought we punched above our weight. I think we did too. I think we made a really great game that a bunch of people enjoyed.”

But a lot of people didn’t: or at least said they didn’t. Fallout: Tactics didn’t just diverge from what the previous games had done, but above all else suffered from the unfortunate fact it wasn’t (the Black Isle) Fallout 3.

“The other window was the existing Fallout fan base and the incredibly fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic people in that fan base,” says Orman. “There was a minority I remember seeing on there who were like ‘Hey, it’s pretty good game. I like what they’ve done to improve these things about Fallout.’ But the vast majority were like, ‘This isn’t a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.’ And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fan base.”

The unfortunate thing was that, even before the team began work on Fallout: Tactics, they were part of that fanbase, and as the game was developed became even bigger fans. Perhaps the wounds cut deep because, on some level, these were the fellow travellers that the developers had hoped to please.

“That was disheartening,” says Orman. “God, it was gutting. The art team in particular were super gutted, because a lot of the visuals of the robots and things like that which they had slaved away on, those were the things that were getting dinged for not fitting the aesthetic. Visually, it was really easy to point at things and go, ‘This doesn’t fit the universe.’ So they copped it hard.

“It was a rough time. And I think we put more weight on the fan base, because we were trying to make people happy. You want to make the fan base happy. You want to make another one too. You want people to like it. So, yeah, it was a gut punch.

“It doesn’t help that there was already a schism in that fan base, between Fallout 1 and 2, because they were totally different games. So there was already that going on. And then let’s add a third game.”

Unbeknownst to Orman at the time, publisher Interplay was in serious financial trouble: and so while a Tactics sequel was planned, it would never happen. Interplay was soon in such hot water that it would sell the Fallout IP to Bethesda in 2004, which began work on the game we now know as Fallout 3. Which in itself, oddly enough, lent Tactics something more of a shine.

“Over time that [negativity] did seem to change,” says Orman. “Fallout 1 and 2 was packaged with Tactics, and people came to appreciate Tactics for what it was.

“I also wonder, once Fallout 3 came out, how much that solidified the group to go, ‘Well, that’s not my Fallout.’ So it might have legitimised us a bit there too.”

Bethesda would soon enough decide, however, that it was going to make Tactics a non-canon entry in the series (which “sucked,” Orman told PC Gamer). It remains one of the oddest entries in a now-massive series and, in ways big and small, keeps bleeding out into the contemporary stuff: “little bits and pieces of Tactics you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time,” says Orman. “And that’s good enough for me.”

You can read Jeremy Peel’s full interview here: The Making of Fallout Tactics.