“Players are selfish”: Fallout 2’s Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy

Like many of the engineers and developers of that era, toiling in their garages and quietly building the future of computing, young Chris Avellone used other creator’s work as a foundation.

“One technique I tried was dissecting existing game engines,” he recalls, “more like an adventure game framework, and then finding ways to alter the content layer to create the game. But the attempts rarely compiled without a stream of errors.”

The shine moment

Every failure was an…