Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was not the first Fallout 3 in development. Prior to Bethesda’s take on the series, Black Isle Studios, which would eventually reform at Obsidian Entertainment, was working on its own version of the game that stayed true to the original games’ isometric roots.

Also known as Van Buren, the game was Black Isle’s second stab at a new Fallout and saw Fallout New Vegas designers Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer working together on the game. In the game, players could play as a human, ghoul, or even Super Mutant across a map that spanned Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.

In a recent interview with The Examined Game, thanks GR, Sawyer explained that he took on the role of lead systems designer on the project as “most of the other designers weren’t as interested”. During development, “all of the senior people left to form Obsidian”, but Sawyer “still wanted to see if we could try to get Fallout [3] done.”

“There was a group of people that were still there,” he explained. “Bit by bit, people started leaving for Obsidian or other companies. And it became clear that Interplay was not gonna make it, really. And that was rough because when I came to Black Isle, my dream game—I mean, I wanted to work on a D&D game, that was incredible, that was a great opportunity—but my dream was to work on Fallout 3.”

Sawyer explains that, as his peers jumped ship, he saw his dream game “fall apart” with only a few devs remaining. “There was one character artist that we had,” he said. “We had been taken down to a skeleton crew and that resource got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle. And I was like, ‘oh, they don’t want us to do anything. They don’t care we’re working on.’”

Fallout 3: Van Buren wasn’t too far along in development, but the game did have an impressive tech demo. “It looks very dated now,” Sawyer says, “but it was like 2003 when this demo was finished.” The developer explains that “it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things”, and Interplay executives told him after the game’s cancellation that seeing the demo would have saved the project.

“I left, but Tom French, the producer, showed it, finally showed it to the Interplay people who remained,” he said. “And what he told me is that they said: ‘Well, if we had known that you had made this, maybe we wouldn’t have cancelled it.’ It’s like, we asked you repeatedly to come see what we were working on.

“We asked you repeatedly to come look at our budgets and out schedules. We were quite literally upstairs from you. We invited you over, and over, and over again, and you never came. And that was the point, really, when I lost my last—I can’t remember if was an environment or character art resource—but we can’t make a game. And if they’re just going to continue stripping resources from us, they don’t care. They’re not going to support us, so I had to leave.”

Sawyer would eventually helm Fallout New Vegas, fulfilling his dream to work on a Fallout game, even if it wasn’t an isometric title like the originals. To this day, New Vegas has been deemed the pinnacle of modern Fallout, and has served as the inspiration for the ongoing Fallout TV show, which Sawyer is a huge fan of.