It’s taken Brian Fargo more than a decade to get the band back together for a follow-up release to the smash hit “Wasteland.”
His Newport Beach crew is a lot smaller than its predecessor; there’s no big-budget advertising campaign or label behind the launch; and the rules of the game have changed drastically from the years before today’s social media-driven landscape.
That’s a big reason he embarked on a recent three-week global tour promoting his latest collaboration to influential bloggers, reviewers, and other industry insiders in London, Paris, Germany, and both U.S. coasts.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” said Fargo, the producer and co-designer of one of the most successful science-fiction role-playing video games.
The founder of inXile Entertainment hopes to capture the same success in the sequel, “Wasteland II,” a nuclear post-apocalyptic tale told through futuristic desert rangers trying to bring peace, structure and law to obliterated lands throughout the Southwest.
A distressed radio broadcast leads the first responders to Los Angeles, which was thought to have been eviscerated but is inhabited by a small group of survivors, bizarre cults and new enemies.
“Wasteland II,” which costs about $40 and will be primarily distributed electronically, will be available on PCs, Macs and Linux operating systems.
The original title, developed by Fargo’s Interplay Entertainment Corp. in Irvine, (see related story, page 20), and published in 1988 by Electronics Arts for the Commodore 65, Apple II and PC DOS computers, went on to spawn a franchise and sell more than 400,000 copies, considered a big-time success at the time.
“Keep in mind that a hit game 25 years ago was quite different,” Fargo said.
Interplay’s 1997 role-playing spinoff game, “Fallout,” sold more than 3 million units. The third installment, released in 2008, sold more than 4.7 million.
“I knew there was a big audience that wanted this kind of game,” said Fargo, who in 2003 acquired the rights to “Wasteland” from the large Redwood City-based publisher and game developer Electronic Arts Inc. after years of negotiations.
Yet publisher after publisher passed on the idea. Some weren’t interested in a franchise or were unwilling to enter a new genre, while others had filled their fantasy category.
“Everybody’s line was a little bit different. It was frustrating,” Fargo said of the eight-year string of rejections.
There was a bright light at the end of the tunnel. “You would have never considered how lucky I was that everyone passed.”
He turned to his last option available: the New York-based crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which was gaining traction nationally.
Within 43 hours, the campaign blew past its $900,000 fundraising goal, and when it ended about a month later on April 17, 2012, nearly 62,000 backers had pledged more than $2.9 million to fund “Wasteland II.”
“It was a very emotional moment,” Fargo said. “The prior two years was absolute hell.”
The game is the 17th highest funded project in Kickstarter’s five-year history and the seventh most funded in its gaming segment. The site has racked up more than 68,000 successfully funded projects to date.
“Social media has changed everything,” Fargo said. “The power has shifted to the people.”
The lifeline helped inXile hire many of the key designers, engineers and composers from the original title to work on the sequel.
It brought on dozens of writers to script more than 500,000 words in the storyline, trumping the word count of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and rivaling Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
“I put things in overdrive,” Fargo said.
InXile now employs about 30 people at its headquarters on the Balboa Peninsula above Jack’s Surfboards.
The company is tweaking some glitches in “Wasteland II” before its long-awaited release.
Fargo said, “We’re in the final stretch.”
