INDUSTRY LEGEND
BRIAN FARGO
After building up Interplay up into one of the games industry’s powerhouse publishers, Brian Fargo is an undoubted giant of the industry. But above all else, he’s a developer, who helped define RPGs as we know them. Happily, he’s still making them, with the glorious Wasteland 3 his most recent effort
BRIAN Fargo was once one of the colossi of the games industry: the head honcho of Interplay, which he built up into one of the biggest games publishers, from humble beginnings as a programmer. Those who are too young to remember as far back as the 1990s will not have come across Interplay, but it was a massively pioneering, influential publisher, and among Fargo’s achievements there, you can include inventing the post-apocalyptic RPG genre, along with providing the first platform for Blizzard, BioWare and Treyarch to show their skills.
Happily, Fargo is still very much in the game: his developer InXile, formed in 2002 after he left Interplay, last year released the superb Wasteland 3, after turning to Kickstarter to fund it. So, Fargo is pretty much a walking encyclopaedia of how the games industry has mutated since its beginnings.
Making games in the 1980s and 90s
And Fargo has been making games since the industry was very young: his first effort, graphical text adventure The Demon’s Forge, was released initially in 1981. Fargo recalls his entry to the thenfledgling games industry: “I actually applied to work at interplay when I was 16 years old. Oh, jeez: I got turned down. I had graduated high school early, but they did not hire me, which was fine, if a bit soul-crushing then.
“Interplay was a special moment in time in the video game business. I started there when I was 20 years old, as a programmer, I started doing development work and then we kept getting these hits and they kept growing us, and we ended up becoming a publisher in our own right. It was a blast. I was also always scouting for talent. So, we launched, Blizzard, BioWare, Treyarch: they were all companies which we gave their first contract to. I used to go to Europe and look for titles. I’d go to [long-defunct UK videogames show] ECTS and it was like a Cannes film festival. I picked up Alone in the Dark and all the Delphine Software stuff: Future Wars and Out of this World [known as Another World outside of the US], and products from Gremlin: there were all these different facets to it that I used to absolutely enjoy.”