Fallout 3’s lead artist says its ‘sparse’ vision of post-apocalypse is ‘messy, and there’s lots of inconsistency—but I like that, because it mimics the real world’

The latest issue of Edge magazine features an article on the making of Fallout 3, including interviews with some of Bethesda’s key creatives tasked with bringing the classic isometric series into 3D. Fallout itself “was a big pivot” for a studio best-known for the fantasy world of the Elder Scrolls, says lead artist Istvan Pely, and meant the studio “had to prove that we could pull off a totally different genre, the opposite of fantasy.”

Pely was responsible for much of the game’s look, and he began by going back to the source. “It started with the box art,” recalls Pely. “The original Fallout 1 box, with the power armour on it, was iconic. To me, that was Fallout. So, that was the first thing, the first asset. The next iconic thing was the Pip-Boy. It’s kind of an abstracted thing in the early games. But we wanted it to be an actual, physical device that you wear on your wrist. Then it was the Vault suit…”