Troika and the Fallout rights - where did I read that?

[callehe]

too expensive? Beth bought the damn thing for 1 million dollars.

holy cow, 1 million bucks is small potatoes compared to the worth of the fallout licence. I mean seriously - fallout MUST have had a greater profit margin than 1 million dollars?

 

[LeonX]

I didn't do the 'no mages allowed' ad - is that the one with the ogre? I'll have to dig through my stuff to see if I have a copy of it to post somewhere. I know I have the Mage painting ad. Glenn Fabry did the ads and box cover for us.

While a mill might not seem like alot for a license, Fallout has never broken big in the mainstream in terms of sales. It is my belief that a quality Fallout game would bring in bigger numbers now because of its reputation that has grown over time, but there's no numbers for the marketing people to plug into their profit and loss statements to back that up. And, as we all know, I'm no businessman, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

leon

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

I heard your making board games now, like monopoly.

 

[Jora]

Yes, I'm talking about the ad with the ogre. I would be glad to see any Arcanum related material you can find, however. :D

 

[Ausir]

Chris Taylor, Stott Everts and Tom Decker are, Leon just makes illustrations for them (and pretty neat ones, I might add).

Some more old Fallout concept art or docs you made, like the ones posted at No Mutants Allowed some time ago, would also be neat .

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Re: I hate to break this up

I would have posted sooner, but you guys seemed to be having too much fun.

For the record:

We never, ever bid on Fallout. One major publisher mentioned Interplay was shopping it around and would be interested in us developing it for them, but theydropped it as too expensive when they found out the asking price (not ours, Interplay's). We never had our own money, and were just beginning to toy with the idea of independent funding near the end of our life as a business - which was after Beth had already gotten Fallout.

I did approach Bethesda about us working with them on Fallout, but they were uninterested. Instead of flaiming them for this however, think about it from their point of view: who among us would want to pay a huge amount of money for a license and then turn it over to someone else? I'm assuming they paid the $$ because they wanted to make a Fallout game, end of story.

Our post apocalyptic game was going to be something new, simply because we loved the genre. We struggled with whether to make it post apoc or not, since Beth already had Fallout, but our love for the genre outweighed other considerations.

I'm not going to go anywhere near the argument of who is responsible for Fallout's greatness, except to say that Scott Campbell never gets the credit he deserves in all these arguments. He wrote alot of the original story and came up with alot of the characters and places as well.

Leonard Boyarsky
----------------------------------
Shameless plug: www.leonardboyarsky.com

That was pretty interesting. Thanks for the details!

Just as a question of interest: would Troika have been able and/ or interested to use the concepts, assets, etc. of the Van Buren project or would it have developed from scratch? I never followed the story closely, so maybe someone can key me in on that?

 

[Briosafreak]

The No Mages Allowed ad is somewhere on the NMA gallery, i scan it a long time ago, and we`ve toyed with the idea of creating a site around it, but never went through, Rosh had some funky ideas for it.

Leon Boyarsky isn`t a part of ZeroRadiusGames but has made some art that you can find in their mainpage.

The post apoc RPG seemed really interesting, can you reveal a bit more about it now, after this time passed?

And Leon there was at least one newsbit beeing prepared on a major mag with the title "Troika Gets Fallout!Hurrah!" , i think for a while you were closer to get to make a Fallout game than you think.Or not.Well it`s past now, glad you posted.

Where`s Kathode anyway?

Edit: Leon there`s a poster here by the name of Volourn, i don`t know if you`ve met him before, any words you might have for him by any chance?

 

[Ausir]

Just as a question of interest: would Troika have been able and/ or interested to use the concepts, assets, etc. of the Van Buren project or would it have developed from scratch? I never followed the story closely, so maybe someone can key me in on that?

I doubt Troika would use any of Van Buren assets. Those would probably get used only if Obsidian got the license.

 

[Rat Keeng]

It is my belief that a quality Fallout game would bring in bigger numbers now because of its reputation that has grown over time...

Heh, yeah. Fallout License + Star Trek Captain >= SLAMDUNK!

There, that's one up for the Codex stereotype. And on that note, I should probably get back to stalking Volourn, it seems he's gone apeshit again.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Just as a question of interest: would Troika have been able and/ or interested to use the concepts, assets, etc. of the Van Buren project or would it have developed from scratch? I never followed the story closely, so maybe someone can key me in on that?

I doubt Troika would use any of Van Buren assets. Those would probably get used only if Obsidian got the license.

Why?

 

[LeonX]

I love Volourn! I obviously disagree with some of his opinions, but his wrath and vitriol are amazing to behold.

Beyond some very early pitch docs which revolved mostly around how cool it would be for someone to give Fallout's 'original creators' (oops, I can hear Volourn typing furiously already) money to make its spritiual successor, we really never went too far with any concepts for the new post apoc game. Obviously, no one with the money to fund it thought it would be as cool as we did There seemed to be some very good interest in it at first, but nothing ever progressed beyond the early stages.

While I never got the chance to look at any of the Van Buren stuff personally, I doubt we would have wanted to use it simply because we had our own ideas of where we'd want to take FO3. As far as the engine, it wasn't finished, and unless we had the original engineers working on it it would have been more trouble than it was worth to try to finish someone else's engine, I believe. All this is pure speculation with no basis in reality, of course...

leon

 

[Whipporowill]

It's pretty humbling seeing someone who'se work you admire looking for employment. Must be hard going from being being your own boss and running a studio making games you want to make - and then have to start pretty much over from scratch (albeit with a kickass resume) in someone elses company.

Hope you get to what you want to do, and if it by any chance is something to do with crpgs - then I bet we'll all hear about it - one way or the other...

 

[Briosafreak]

Thanks Leon


And :D

 

[Fintilgin]

Yeah, that's good to hear, actually. Ironicaly, despite my bitching, Bethesda is on my very short list of perfered homes for the Fallout license, behind the Late, Lameted, Troika. I just really didn't like the thought that they muscled Troika out of the way OR the idea that the 'original creators' were somehow not qualified or worthy of the license. Bah, I say, bah!

I don't suppose you have any hints to drop on future plans in the industry? I suppose a phoneix-like ressurection of Troika isn't in the cards, but I'd love to see you guys go 'Spiderweb Software' or something. No huge budgets, no stingey publishers, no fighting for shelf space with RTS Clone #27, just pure CPRG goodness.

Um. What if I said please? C'mon, throw me a bone here. :sniff, sniff:

Well, thanks, anyway. Here's to three kickass games!

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's pretty humbling seeing someone who'se work you admire looking for employment. Must be hard going from being being your own boss and running a studio making games you want to make - and then have to start pretty much over from scratch (albeit with a kickass resume) in someone elses company.

Hope you get to what you want to do, and if it by any chance is something to do with crpgs - then I bet we'll all hear about it - one way or the other...

McMurphy: Well, I tried, didn't I? Goddamn it, at least I did that.

 

[Greatatlantic]

@LeonX

First, let me thank you for the new sig material. Some may claim I'm taking it out of context, but it seems to fit perfectly with 95% of forum posts if you ask me. Its also good to hear your side, where as before the discussion was IF this happen, it was morally reprehensible. Now, it would appear Bethseda was just the first person to meet Interplay's asking price. And I can't really blame them. It must be every other developer's dream to work on the Fallout franchise. Now, I just hope the do so with the realization that they aren't making a TES game in a new setting.

 

[Volourn]

Troika > Troika Fanboy

Game over.

 

[Twinfalls]

 

[obediah]

is this one of those "Find the differences in these two pictures" things?

 

[Twinfalls]

Nah. I'ts one of those 'I'm being an idiot' things.

 

[kingcomrade]

Volition - Interplay - Freespace series. Interplay didn't pay them for the European sales of the games. They sued, I don't know what happened. Either way, they left and became a part of THQ. Since then they've developed crappy games. Not a good ending to that story.

Crap. I loved the Freespace games, always wondered what happened. THQ makes crappy games? What do they make? I'm used to seeing the THQ label on Relic games, which are usually excellent (homeworld, dawn of war), so what games? Just curious.

 

[Dagon]

LeonX ,are there possibilities to resurrect Troika Games? And to create this PA cRPG which you started doing?

oh ,and hello everyone . my first post

 

[HanoverF]

Must be hard going from being being your own boss and running a studio making games you want to make - and then have to start pretty much over from scratch (albeit with a kickass resume)

I don't know, I mean, he lists Stonekeep on there...

 

[crpgnut]

Hilarious! 13 pages of people raking Bethesda over the coals because they stole the bid from Troika, how they were immoral, heartless bastards and how Freak and some others had all this proof that this was gospel, and yet here comes one of the owners to say, "Nope, we never even made a bid on the game." The rest of this thread should be full of apologies to MSFD and Kathode, but that'd take a real man to do. Instead, we get to watch the painful fawning of the faithful to their fallen master.

I hope Leon does well. I think that if Troika had a few business types to offset the creative geniuses there, the company would still be in business. Lack of polish killed Troika. I hope that we see the "big 3" again soon.

 

[LeonX]

I couldn't agree more about Troika's need for business types. I believe I've mentioned before that we were looking to recruit a business guy to run that side of things before we circled the drain.

Sadly, barring any miracles, Troika is pretty much dead and buried. We have officially gone out of business from a legal standpoint. Oh, well, seven years isn't a bad run. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go sob quietly in the corner.

leon

www.leonardboyarsky.com <------makes a great gift!