Fallout’s creator reveals you could have played as a snoring cow hater who believes in UFOs, had Black Isle stuck with its original licensed roleplaying system

The character system used in Fallout is famously based upon its roleplaying system called SPECIAL. But this wasn’t always the case. In fact, for most of the original game’s development, Fallout’s mechanics were based upon a licensed, table-top roleplaying system called GURPS, which, yes, sounds more like a digestive tract disorder than a TTRPG ruleset.

Anyway, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System was at the heart of Fallout from its conception in 1994 all the way to early 1997, when GURPS’ creator Steve Jackson (not that Steve Jackson, this Steve Jackson) objected to Black Isle’s use of the system because of Fallout’s stupefying levels of violence. Hence, GURPS was usurped by SPECIAL, and history took a different course.

Despite being at the centre of Fallout for three years, little about Fallout’s GURPS incarnation has been revealed in the last 30 years. Until now, that is. Fallout creator Tim Cain recently discovered the list of GURPS attributes that underpinned Fallout’s initial version, and decided to share it on his YouTube channel.

The reason it’s taken this long for GURPS to resurface, Cain explains in the video, is that he believed everything related to what he refers to as ‘GURPS Fallout’ (that’s when you need to go to the hospital) had been lost. Cain says that nine months before Fallout shipped, he had collected everything GURPS related and handed it to Interplay’s own archive guy. But this person apparently didn’t do a very good job at the whole ‘archiving’ bit of being an archivist, and it all got lost.

“I had my own archive which on orders I destroyed when I left Interplay, but I assumed they had the old one and they didn’t,” Cain says. Luckily, Cain’s own archive doesn’t appear to have been quite as destroyed as he thought. “I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills that had been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout.”

The GURPS system was at once simpler and much, much more complicated than Fallout’s SPECIAL system. As Cain explains, it only had four base stats—strength, health, IQ and dexterity. But this was tied to a voluminous list of advantages, disadvantages and quirks that stood in place of Fallout’s perks. Basically, advantages cost you ability points, while disadvantages would give you ability points in exchange for a debuff. Quirks hovered somewhere in the middle, acting as minor disadvantages designed to give your character extra colour.

I’m not going to repeat the full list here, because it is pretty dang long. But some of them seem hyper-specific. Advantages, for example, included things like acute hearing, peripheral vision, reputational advantages for each of Fallout’s main locations, and three types of attractiveness buff, including “handsome” and “very handsome”. Disadvantages, meanwhile, included bad breath, habitually picking your nose, a stutter, anosmia, plus reputational disadvantages and three types of ugliness. This includes “hideous—you’re the most disgusting thing ever born in the vault.”

Most interesting to me, though, are the Quirks. Cain says these were designed to respond to specific circumstances. “There would be one or two places in the game that we would check to see if you had a quirk and then the game would do something slightly different”. Some of the quirks are fairly straightforward, like “fear of heights” (though that is pretty funny given Fallout is isometric). Others are weird in a way that fits well with Fallout, like “believes in UFOs”, “snores loudly” or my personal favourite, “hates cows”. I just love the idea of someone investing that much negative emotion toward a cow, the most anodyne animal on the planet.

Cain doesn’t say much about what he thought of the GURPS version, but personally I’m glad we ended up with SPECIAL. While I can imagine the GURPS system producing some fun effectives, it also sounds pretty convoluted, and the original Fallout isn’t exactly an easy game to return to anyway.