Fallout's 25th anniversary took place today and to celebrate, several developers have been looking back at some of the series' best titles and have been offering little development tidbits. For example, a number of devs have revealed a bit of behind the scenes info on Fallout 3 and its setting, Washington DC, specifically about the game's lack of the White House despite that pretty much every other memorial is still standing.
Well, it turns out that developers at Bethesda decided to stick a crater where the White House would be as they "didn't really have room on the schedule" to do it after sorting out the rest of the city's monuments. In a new video uploaded to the official Bethesda Softworks YouTube channel (thanks GamesRadar), Fallout 3 lead artist Istvan Pely reveals that because the team ran out of development time to get the White House finished, they simply decided to blow the entire thing up, believing that it would have been "the first thing they took out."
"While working on DC, we realized that we had not done the White House yet, and we didn't really have room on the schedule to do the White House," says Pely. "We'd done a lot of the other landmarks and ruins of them scattered throughout the city, but that was kind of a major one. We were kind of running out of time..."
"The White House would've been the first thing they took out, so let's just wipe it. It doesn't exist here. It was sort of an Indiana Jones 'shoot the gun at the whip' kind of moment for us, but it did the trick and I think people got a kick out of that."
In another video celebrating the series' 25th birthday, it was revealed that Fallout: New Vegas was originally going to be a massive expansion for Fallout 3. It was only because Todd Howard "felt really strongly that it should be its own game" that it became a standalone title, clearly a fantastic decision since it's widely regarded as the best game in the series.