Jason D. Anderson

Jason D. Anderson, usually credited as Jason Anderson, is a video game developer. He started out as a contract artist for Interplay on the USCF Chess project. He was later hired to work on Fallout for which he became Lead Technical Artist, working on the original game design, interface, and quests. After working on the prototype design for Fallout 2, Anderson left with fellow developers Timothy Cain and Leonard Boyarsky to found Troika Games. After Troika Games collapsed, Anderson left the game industry for a short time to sell real estate.

Interplay reopened in-house development and in 2007 hired Anderson as Creative Director for an unannounced massively multiplayer online game. In March 2009, Anderson joined inXile Entertainment as Creative Director. In January 2011, he left inXile to join Turtle Rock Studios. In March 2012, inXile announced the crowdfunded development of Wasteland 2 with Anderson as the game's storyline author.

In March 2019 it was announced on Twitter that Anderson had rejoined inXile, who in the meantime had been acquired by Microsoft alongside Obsidian Entertainment. This indirectly reunites him with Troika colleagues Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who work for Obsidian.

Jason Anderson grew up being the youngest of 10 children. He got into Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) around the age of 10 when his mom bought him the basic D&D set. Already at a young age, he enjoyed using the D&D and Avalon Hill settings to imagine his own adventures set in other universes such as Blade Runner. He learned basic programming on the Apple II and created his own dungeon crawling program to simulate dungeons and random encounters from the D&D table top game. After high school he nearly stopped using the computer altogether, focusing on working in construction and getting his degree as Recording engineering from Golden West College in 1992. He later purchased an Amiga and subsequently taught himself to use both LightWave 3D and 3D Studio (for Windows). He sent a sample of his work to Interplay Entertainment, which got him started in the computer games industry.

He has mentioned X-COM, Jagged Alliance and Planescape: Torment as being some of his favorite games.

Anderson got his first contract working on USCF Chess and was subsequently offered a full-time position at Interplay Entertainment. His first job was 'clean-up artist' on Stonekeep, which was just about to ship. In 1993 he was assigned to the GURPS-related project being developed by Tim Cain; the yet to be named Fallout. Within a short time, he rose to a lead position and became a key member of the Fallout team. His role in making the game started out with supplying Cain with art to test out with the graphics engine he was building. Even though Anderson was hired as an artist, he was allowed to take on several roles in the development process. He attended all design meetings and ultimately designed the way art would be implemented into the Fallout engine.

The small team size also contributed to the diversity of the tasks. Anderson created a large part of the opening cinematic, modeled and animated around half of the creatures, including female humans and mutants. He also built the interface, created many of the landscape tiles and wall sets. Finally, he did significant design work as well, especially concerning the story and the quests. Anderson's wife also contributed to the development of the game, creating the death screen and doing several animations (including the two-headed Brahmin and Mr. Handy) and in-game movies shown when the water levels are lowering, the 'dipped in the vats/turn you into a mutant movie' and the 'exploding mutant vats movie'. One of Anderson's fondest memory from Fallout's development was coming up with the ending to the game in conjunction with Leonard Boyarsky. They figured it would fit the tone of the game, including the xenophobic nature of the vault dwellers, if the main character would actually be rejected by his former people. Cain was skeptical at first, given its unorthodox nature compared to other RPGs which were usually about empowering the player and becoming a hero. But he eventually gave in to the idea.

Fallout shipped in October 1997 and became a commercial success, eventually selling around 600,000 copies. Therefore, Interplay began the initial design work for the sequel. However, the initial team, notably Cain, Anderson and Boyarsky, felt that many design decisions were being taken without their consent such as who should work on the project. Anderson recalls disagreement with Interplay concerning who the next team members should be. As Fallout had received little attention internally from Interplay during its development gave the designers extensive freedom to craft the game the way they wanted to. However, that began to change already in the final months before it shipped. Cain says that he was unhappy at how development worked at Interplay while developing Fallout. People who neither played nor liked games were making crucial decisions about marketing the game, its features, and the shipping date. Consequently, Cain became increasingly discontent with the new working environment at Interplay. Already in July 1997, three months before Fallout would ship, he had decided that he did not want to work on the sequel. Before Thanksgiving that year, he told Feargus Urquhart of his plans of quitting the company, as he was afraid that increased interference from different units of Interplay would hamper his creative freedom of working on the game. Cain ended up working on Fallout 2 for a few more months, and was given the role of lead designer and producer. Boyarsky and Anderson wrote the main story line for the game. However, the problems persisted. According to Cain, marketing and sales took counterproductive decisions pertaining inter alia to game box design without consulting him. His wish to become division manager for the marketing department was met with resistance from Urquhart, who saw this as an infringement on his own authority and responsibilities. Cain recalls spending too much time arguing with people and trying to defend the game from devolving into a lesser product. Boyarsky and Anderson were both unwilling to work on a sequel for Fallout without him.