MMO vet Matt Firor was going to make Fallout Online in 2007, but Interplay 'went totally dark on me' and he went to Bethesda to make ESO instead
Fallout 76 is about the closest we're likely get to a fully-fledged Fallout MMO—given the genre's pretty hard to get into nowadays and, well, it's doing rather well. But there was a time that would've seen a massively multiplayer variant of the wasteland competing with Blizzard's biggest: The ill-fated, legally-tangled Fallout Online.
That's per Matt Firor, in an interview with YouTube channel MinnMax. Firor was the director and founder of ZeniMax, which runs The Elder Scrolls Online, before leaving the studio in 2025 shortly after Microsoft's bloodbath, which saw his brainchild Project Blackbird cancelled. He also worked on another MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, back in the day.
"I had gotten some promised investment, I was pitching a publisher 'Brash Entertainment', which existed [for] about six weeks in that timeframe, and I was talking directly with the head of Interplay"—Interplay published Fallout 1 and 2 via its subsidiary studio Black Isle Studios—"and I had a design, I was getting a team together, I was getting a budget together."
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But then, says Firor, silence: "He just went totally dark on me, wouldn't return calls or emails, and then like, four weeks later, the headlines: Bethesda acquires rights to Fallout, and I was like 'oh, god'."
Given Firor's work with Bethesda later down the line on ESO, though, he still did technically get to work on a Fallout MMO, in a way: "I'm in the special thanks in Fallout 76, I got other credits," which he notes was likely due to a "realisation that I was calling them way too often with advice.
"But it was more about the fact I grew up in West Virginia," rather than his MMO expertise, he admits. The missed opportunity doesn't bother Firor, though: "It's in totally good hands. I played the sh*t out of 76, I love that game, I played 'em all and they're great."
Inside The Cancellation Of Elder Scrolls Online’s Successor - MinnMax Interview - YouTube
Fallout Online was an MMO that went through a lot of legal turmoil, with Firor's involvement being a footnote—in the interview linked above, Firor doesn't actually make note of when he was revving up to take control over it (Bethesda actually bought rights from Interplay twice, once in 2004 to make Fallout 3, and again in 2007 to get the IP wholesale) but I have found this IGN interview from 2021 wherein he tells the same anecdote.
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In it, Firor notes that he was trying to assemble Brash Entertainment in the year after his previous studio, Mythic, was bought out by EA in 2006. That places this potential Fallout Online pitch circa 2007, when Bethesda bought the Fallout IP outright.
In that same year, Firor would found Zenimax Studio (under the same parent company of Bethesda) and begin work on The Elder Scrolls Online, instead. As for why they didn't put him on a Fallout Online MMO stat? Well, Bethesda actually allowed Interplay to keep the rights to make Fallout Online.
This would come to a head in 2009 when Bethesda sued Interplay over the rights to make it, claiming that Interplay hadn't held up its end of the bargain to secure funding and begin development—Bethesda lost that first round, and Interplay was allowed to keep working on it for a time, but the legal slapfight between the two companies continued right up until 2012, when an out-of-court settlement saw Interplay lose the rights to develop a Fallout MMO entirely.
Basically, Matt Firor probably dodged a bullet—winding up on the right side of that particular spat. The Elder Scrolls Online would be released in 2014 after seven years of development.
