Strange detail discovered on Fallout 2 box art

JustAShcookius

JustAShcookius

It Wandered In From the Wastes
While poking around Mobygames' Fallout 2 repository, I came upon a series of images that struck me as very interesting. Polish and French Fallout 2 box art appears to have this inexplicably large city featured on the box and jewel case insert. This city is ENORMOUS, and evidently possesses a completely functioning power grid with enough electricity to expend on wasteful amounts of illumination. The skyscrapers appear to be prewar and damaged, but restored to livable condition. What on earth could this mean?

This strikes me as being eerily similar to how the Lucky 38 in NV glows in the sky at night in the intro.

This is wholly lacking on American releases from what I can tell.
4326724-fallout-2-windows-other.jpg

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Here is the Lucky 38 at night:
vjbagz5h4wg31.png

Here is the American box art most of us are familiar with to compare:
5848612-fallout-2-windows-front-cover.jpg
 
It's probably New Reno if anything but I don't know why that would be on certain releases and not others. It doesn't seem like anything significant that they'd need to change for whatever reason.
 
Interesting form on those Skyscrapers. Kinda look like this:

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This is probably the inspiration:

 
Is CD Projekt a legit publisher or still a pirate publisher in those days?


Those tall buildings look like someone glued Tetris blocks together...
 
I would read into the background as being a nuclear blast. The foreground is the goat-headed man obviously a freemason.
If it was the holodisk version it would show NMA members looking back into the past thinking of shit to post.
 
PlanHex said:
Is CD Projekt a legit publisher or still a pirate publisher in those days?
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Pretty sure after around 1994-95 they were trying to doing legal business and localizations. I think prior to that, the founders were young and selling pirated material during their high school years. According to how old Google says they are, they'd have been out of high school for about 2-3 years before starting CD Projekt legitimately.
 
SquidWard said:
the founders were young and selling pirated material
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like most people in eastern europe in the late 90's and early 2000's.
i remember flea markets were full of pirated movies and games. back then very few had iinternet at home so they gladly paid people to download movies games for them.
 
raynor009 said:
like most people in eastern europe in the late 90's and early 2000's.
i remember flea markets were full of pirated movies and games. back then very few had iinternet at home so they gladly paid people to download movies games for them.
Click to expand...
In any case, the images appear to be fully legit renders from Interplay. You can actually see the shadows and reflections on the helmet from the illumination behind it. I wonder if this box art came out too late to be useful and simply got deferred to foreign release. We may never know.

Apparently someone asked Chris Avellone (or was it Tim Cain UGH) about this piece of advertisement below (for what its worth), and he could not seem to remember it ever existing. I mean, he WAS in production and not sales, and would not know all the intricacies of the running business. This lack of communication would unfortunately confirm your hypotheses about the box art being relatively meaningless. Unless, it is Chris Avellone being Chris Avellone, in which case, we can't really make a decision.
high quality fallout poster.jpg
 
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JustAShcookius said:
In any case, the images appear to be fully legit renders from Interplay. You can actually see the shadows and reflections on the helmet from the illumination behind it. I wonder if this box art came out too late to be useful and simply got deferred to foreign release. We may never know.

Apparently someone asked Chris Avellone about this piece of advertisement below (for what its worth), and he could not seem to remember it ever existing. I mean, he WAS in production and not sales, and would not know all the intricacies of the running business. This lack of communication would unfortunately confirm your hypotheses about the box art being relatively meaningless. Unless, it is Chris Avellone being Chris Avellone, in which case, we can't really make a decision.
View attachment 28024
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I’m pretty sure Chris Avellone didn’t work on Fallout 1
 
Iprovidelittlepianos said:
I’m pretty sure Chris Avellone didn’t work on Fallout 1
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I've never seen him credited as such or mentioned by Cain or Boyarsky (or anyone they've done catchup talks with on Youtube). But there is an NPC named Chris Avellone in the Boneyard. I'm sure we can make assumptions from that but nothing more really. It would not shock me if Chris was poking his head around Fallout during its development, probably on good terms with the team as they included a character named after him, and showing interest in it considering how prominent his name became to the game series. But only those people would actually know.
Tim might be willing to answer it on Youtube at some point if the question provides enough reason to make a video out of answering it.
 
I'd say this Twitter Thread right here practically confirms Chris Avellone's involvement with Fallout 1:



But hey, at least he was added into the game though! Which spawned The Great Adventures of Chris Avellone throughout the Interplay Era Fallout Games...
He was bounty hunter in the LA Boneyard, then moved to the Midwest G settled in Illinois, and became the Mayor of Springfield, then after that run he moved back to the West, and became known as "The King of the Dance Floor", and died peacefully in his sleep.

:ok: :cool:
 
TheKingofVault14 said:
I'd say this Twitter Thread right here practically confirms Chris Avellone's involvement with Fallout 1:



But hey, at least he was added into the game though! Which spawned The Great Adventures of Chris Avellone throughout the Interplay Era Fallout Games...
He was bounty hunter in the LA Boneyard, then moved to the Midwest G settled in Illinois, and became the Mayor of Springfield, then after that run he moved back to the West, and became known as "The King of the Dance Floor", and died peacefully in his sleep.

:ok: :cool:
Click to expand...

Cut the part where he died, and replace it with losing his memory and becoming a part of Twisted Hair tribe, later becoming Legion's Frumentarius. Now that fits Chris Avellone's self insert.
 
Yes, that box art was on the European version of the game. I always imagined the advanced city in the distance to be Vault City, made most sense to me.
 
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