Interplay Productions
Brian Fargo founded Interplay Productions in 1983. The company's first work was contract development: its initial deal was with Activision, producing Mindshadow for the Apple II and Commodore 64. This was the standard route into the business at the time — a small studio survived by building games another company's name went on, and hoped to accumulate enough capital and reputation to publish under its own.
Interplay's route out of contract work ran through the RPG. Fargo hired a high-school friend, and the studio produced The Bard's Tale for Electronic Arts — a dungeon crawler that sold well enough to establish Interplay as a developer whose RPGs people would buy. The company's identity for the next fifteen years was set by that early success: Interplay was where you went for a computer role-playing game with more text and more systems than the competition thought players would tolerate.
Wasteland
Wasteland (1988) is the game Fargo co-designed and the one his later career kept circling back to. His own description of the pitch was a hybrid: the world simulation and open structure of Ultima, the party mechanics of The Bard's Tale, and a setting borrowed from Mad Max — post-nuclear American Southwest, gangs, radiation, a ranger party with skills that mattered outside combat.
Wasteland's design ideas — meaningful non-combat skill use, consequences that persisted, a world that did not reset itself for the player's convenience — did not have an immediate successor, because Interplay could not obtain the rights to make one. The sequel it made instead, years later and under a different name, was Fallout.
Presented by, and then not
Fargo headed Interplay through Fallout (1997), Fallout 2 (1998), and Fallout Tactics (2001) without working directly on any of them. The intros read "Brian Fargo presents" — a credit that reads as ego until you consider what the alternative was. The design work belonged to the teams; what belonged to Fargo was the decision to greenlight a turn-based post-apocalyptic RPG in the years when the market was moving to 3D action, and the studio culture that made such a project survivable.
He remained CEO until 2002, when Titus Interactive took majority control of the company and Fargo left. He founded InXile Entertainment in 2003. The Wasteland sequel he had wanted since 1988 eventually arrived as Wasteland 2 in 2014, funded by players directly rather than by a publisher, followed by Wasteland 3 in 2020 — twenty-six and thirty-two years, respectively, after the original.