Brian Fargo | Code Like It's 198x

In 1981 a teenager in Newport Beach, California, wrote an adventure game for the Apple II, copied the disks, designed the adverts and sold about 5,000 copies himself. Two years later Brian Fargo founded Interplay Productions. For most of the next two decades Interplay made or published role-playing games that others measured their own against: The Bard’s Tale, Wasteland, Fallout, Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. After he lost the company, Fargo started again, and in 2012 he went to players on Kickstarter for the Wasteland sequel that publishers had turned down.

Fast facts

Born: late 1962 or early 1963. Period magazines gave his age as 24 in December 1987, 25 in February 1989 and 36 in August 1999; Wikidata gives 15 December 1962.
First games: Labyrinths of Mordagon, written with Michael Cranford when he was 18, and The Demon’s Forge (Saber Software, 1981).
Companies: founded Interplay (1983) and inXile Entertainment (2002).
As designer: credited with Michael Cranford for The Bard’s Tale II and with Alan Pavlish, Michael Stackpole and Ken St. Andre for Wasteland (1988), where he was also Interplay’s executive producer.
As producer and head of Interplay: Neuromancer, Battle Chess, Descent, Fallout, and the Black Isle Studios games.

The Demon’s Forge

“I was still in high school when my father brought home the first computer,” Fargo told Commodore Magazine in 1987. “I’d wake up in the morning and sit at the thing until after midnight. All I know about them is self-taught.” His first game, as he told the German magazine PC Player in 1999, was Labyrinths of Mordagon, a multiple-choice adventure written at 18 with the future author of The Bard’s Tale, Michael Cranford. Fargo had an Apple II and Cranford did not, so they took turns: Fargo wrote a section in BASIC, Cranford came round to test it, then took the computer home and wrote the next part. It sold about 300 copies.

While he worked in a ComputerLand store repairing computers, Fargo set up Saber Software, “where I did everything — programmed, manufactured, drew the artwork and distributed the software.” Its game was The Demon’s Forge, a 48K graphic adventure for the Apple II at $29.95. The player is a gladiator cast into the Forge, “an infamous dungeon network” from which “no one in past centuries has escaped alive”. Computer Gaming World printed Fargo’s own scene-setting story next to Saber’s advert, and its review, signed by Michael Cranford, found the game “a step ahead of conventional computer adventuring”. He sold, he recalled, around 5,000 copies.

Interplay

The One reported that Fargo founded Interplay Productions in November 1983. It began by writing games for bigger publishers. The first to go out through a large one was the graphic adventure Mindshadow, for Activision. Then came The Bard’s Tale (1985) for Electronic Arts, which EA advertised in 1986 under Fargo’s name as “the best new dungeon fantasy of 1986”. It almost had no publisher: one turned it down, Fargo remembered, because it came on two disks and the publisher thought that too expensive. At Computer Gaming World’s 1987 awards, Michael Cranford and Brian Fargo were the credited designers of The Bard’s Tale II, a nominee for Adventure Game of the Year.

By late 1987, at 24, Fargo had stopped programming. “I’m really sort of a director here at Interplay,” he told Commodore Magazine. “We have a graphic artist here, a guy who is an expert with sound, we have a programmer who is the main guy. We have a designer who adds the real meat to our products… I sort of collaborate all of these individual talents into the final product.” Everyone at the company, he added, was under 30.

That was how he worked on Wasteland (1988). Computer Gaming World credited its design to Alan Pavlish, Michael Stackpole, Fargo and Ken St. Andre, with Fargo as executive producer for Interplay, and on 3 September 1988 he and Pavlish collected the magazine’s Adventure Game of the Year award for it. The same year Interplay began publishing under its own name, starting with Battle Chess, and Fargo produced Neuromancer, from William Gibson’s novel. Battle Chess was the game he remembered most fondly: the team, he said in 1999, was great and everyone had a fabulous attitude.

The Fallout years

In the 1990s Fargo’s job was choosing and backing other people’s games. Interplay published Parallax Software’s Descent, Blizzard’s early The Lost Vikings and Delphine’s Out of This World, and it made Fallout itself. Fallout was a near thing. According to Edge, it took from 1994 to 1997, survived two near-cancellations, and its designers argued with marketing and executives over everything from the setting to the name. Fargo took an early build home for a weekend and then told the lead programmer, Tim Cain: “You should call this Fallout.” Its advertisements called it “the unofficial sequel to Wasteland”, because Electronic Arts owned the Wasteland name. In 2010 Fargo told Edge, “Fallout, of course, exists as a franchise because we didn’t have the rights to Wasteland.”

Under Interplay’s role-playing label, Black Isle Studios, came BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. In November 1996 Computer Gaming World placed Fargo third in its list of the most influential people in the industry, saying he had “shown both brilliant product vision and great business instincts” and naming The Bard’s Tale, Wasteland and Dragon Wars.

The role-playing games won praise, but Interplay lost money. It went public in 1998, and in 2001 the French publisher Titus Interactive took control (the Interplay entry tells that story). Fargo left in 2002. “When you run a company like that, you become one and the same,” he told Edge in 2013. “It was a shock for some time when it wasn’t part of me.”

inXile and Kickstarter

Fargo founded inXile Entertainment in 2002. Its first big game was a new, lighter The Bard’s Tale (2004), led on consoles, made, he told Edge, to be friendlier than his old games: “I would never recommend my own RPGs to people who had just got a system — it’s just too much for them to figure out.” inXile spent the next years mostly on smaller games for websites and phones, and in 2011 released Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, whose title reused the name of his first commercial game.

He also wanted to make a sequel to Wasteland, and publishers were not interested. Fargo told Edge of one meeting, with Fallout co-creator Jason Anderson beside him, at which the executive sent text messages all the way through the presentation. On 13 March 2012 inXile asked players on Kickstarter for $900,000, with Fargo offering $100,000 of his own money if they got that far. The campaign closed on $2,933,252, one of the successes that restarted the old-style computer role-playing game (see CRPG renaissance). Wasteland 2 came out in 2014. In 2013 Torment: Tides of Numenera, a successor to Planescape: Torment, asked for the same $900,000 and raised $4,188,927.

For Wasteland 3, inXile raised money through Fig, a crowdfunding platform Fargo had set up himself. In March 2017 he said he would retire once Wasteland 3 was finished: “I’ve been at this since 1981… It seems like I should relax for a little bit.” Then, in November 2018, Microsoft bought inXile, along with Obsidian Entertainment. “This will be the first time in my career that I will get to spend almost all of my time in development, something I’ve always wanted,” Fargo told Wireframe, and he dropped his plans to retire. Wasteland 3 came out in 2020.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 6, September–October 1982: “The Demon’s Forge” by Brian Fargo (the scene-setting story, p. 30); Saber Software advertisement (Apple II, 48K, ©1981); review of The Demon’s Forge by Michael Cranford (48K graphic adventure, $29.95, Saber Software, Newport Beach; “a step ahead of conventional computer adventuring”), p. 39.
Compute! issue 79, December 1986: Electronic Arts advertisement naming Brian Fargo with The Bard’s Tale, “the best new dungeon fantasy of 1986” (the same advertisement ran in Byte, December 1986).
Computer Gaming World issue 42, December 1987: Games of the Year nominations (The Bard’s Tale II, “Michael Cranford and Brian Fargo with Interplay Productions, designers”).
Gary V. Fields, “Behind the Big Names”, Commodore Magazine vol. 8 no. 12, December 1987, pp. 84–86: Fargo at 24; his father’s computer; ComputerLand; Saber Software; “sort of a director”; everyone under 30.
Computer Gaming World issue 53, November 1988, p. 21: 1988 Game of the Year awards (Wasteland’s credited designers; the presentation to Fargo and Pavlish on 3 September 1988).
The One issue 5, February 1989, p. 95: Neuromancer preview (Interplay “founded back in November 1983 by Brian Fargo”; Fargo, 25, president and producer).
Computer Gaming World issue 148, November 1996: “The Most Influential Industry Leaders” (Fargo third).
PC Player (Germany), August 1999, pp. 172–173: interview with Brian Fargo, 36, in German (Labyrinths of Mordagon, written with “the inventor of The Bard’s Tale”; The Demon’s Forge and about 5,000 copies; Mindshadow; the two-disk Bard’s Tale; Battle Chess). Quotations from it here are paraphrased in translation.
Edge issue 137, June 2004: Fargo, inXile and the new The Bard’s Tale.
Edge issue 214, May 2010, p. 16: Fargo left Interplay in 2002; Hunted: The Demon’s Forge; Fallout and the Wasteland rights.
Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, p. 8: Wasteland 2’s $900,000 target and $2,933,252 raised.
Edge issue 252, April 2013, pp. 114–115: Brian Fargo profile (Fallout’s development and name; leaving Interplay; inXile founded in 2002; the publisher meeting; the Kickstarter of 13 March 2012).
Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013: Torment: Tides of Numenera funded ($900,000 asked, $4,188,927 raised).
Wireframe issue 2, November 2018, pp. 13–14: Microsoft buys inXile and Obsidian; Fig and Wasteland 3; Fargo’s statement.
See the Wasteland, Fallout and Interplay entries for the Edge 2010 interview, Fallout’s advertising, the games Interplay published, its flotation and Titus’s takeover, and the release dates of Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2020).
Wikipedia, “inXile Entertainment” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Hunted: The Demon’s Forge released in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InXile_Entertainment
Dean Takahashi, “inXile’s Brian Fargo plans to retire after Wasteland 3 is done in 2019”, GamesBeat, 23 March 2017 (web, secondary): the retirement plan and “I’ve been at this since 1981”. https://gamesbeat.com/inxiles-brian-fargo-plans-to-retire-after-wasteland-3-is-done-in-2019/
Chris Kerr, “InXile founder Brian Fargo will retire once Wasteland 3 has shipped”, Game Developer, 24 March 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/inxile-founder-brian-fargo-will-retire-once-i-wasteland-3-i-has-shipped
“InXile boss Brian Fargo is so happy about the Microsoft deal he canceled his retirement”, PC Gamer, November 2018 (web, secondary), and Wikipedia, “Brian Fargo” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary), citing Robert Purchese, “InXile acquired by Microsoft: the interview”, Eurogamer, 19 November 2018: the retirement plan dropped. https://www.pcgamer.com/inxile-boss-brian-fargo-is-so-happy-about-the-microsoft-deal-he-canceled-his-retirement/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fargo