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Leonard Boyarsky | |
|---|---|
 Boyarsky in 2017 | |
| Occupation(s) | Video game designer, visual artist |
| Employer | Obsidian Entertainment |
| Notable work | Fallout , Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura , Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines , Diablo III , The Outer Worlds |
Leonard Boyarsky is an American computer game designer and visual artist. He is one of the key designers of the video games Fallout and Diablo III .
After he earned a bachelor's degree in Illustration (at Cal State Fullerton) and a bachelor's degree in Fine Art (at Art Center College of Design), he worked as freelance artist for Interplay and Maxis in 1992.
He has cited Wizardry and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos as being his favorite video games, albeit admittedly he was more into comic books when first entering the industry.
Boyarsky joined Interplay Entertainment as employee number 88.
After some freelance work for Interplay (Rags to Riches: The Financial Market Simulation and Castles II: Siege and Conquest ) he was hired as art director, lead artist and designer-writer.
His first work was as lead artist in 1995 was Stonekeep . He was in charge of the conceptualization and implementation of 2D and 3D sprites.
While at Interplay, Boyarsky met Tim Cain and Jason D. Anderson, the future co-founders of Troika Games. The three met after work hours to play Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS. Cain eventually sent an email around, proposing colleagues to meet after work hours over pizza to discuss making a video game based on an engine he had built. The five people who showed up, including Boyarsky and Anderson, would become the core team working on Fallout .
Boyarsky recalls suggesting the post-apocalyptic setting, as he and Anderson were both huge Mad Max 2 fans. Boyarsky was adamant about not making a fantasy game, due to the large number of fantasy RPGs in the market.
Two years later, in 1997, he finished his work as art director on Fallout, where he set the recognizable 1950s future graphics style, the humorous Vault Boy Traitcards and also the unusual ending. He also did some polishing on the dialogs for the game. Before leaving Interplay to form Troika Games with Cain and Anderson, he designed the overall gameplay refinements and main story arc, quests, areas, and characters for Fallout 2 in 1998.
Boyarsky had different roles at Troika Games; among others he was project leader, art director, designer-writer and CEO.
On their first project, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura , which was released 2001, he filled similar positions as in Fallout, doing the art direction, dialog writing-editing and story-quest design. He was the project leader and art director on Troika's last released game in late 2004, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines . He worked also on an untitled post-apocalyptic game which was never released due to financial trouble, though a demonstration video of the engine was later released for the public. [1]
As Troika closed in early 2005, he took a year off due to burnout syndrome. He was later asked by Blizzard Entertainment to work on the story and RPG elements on Diablo III . [2]
Boyarsky worked as lead world designer on Diablo III and its subsequent expansion Diablo III: Reaper of Souls at Blizzard Entertainment. His role included fleshing out the lore, dialogue and quests in the game. He found it important to build upon the story elements of the Diablo franchise, and convey its intricacies in a more compelling way.
This emphasis marked a shift for Blizzard, who had previously focused less on developing the story elements of the Diablo franchise. This shift was exemplified at 2011’s BlizzCon, where Chris Metzen chaired the first-ever lore panel, with Boyarsky as the main presenter.
Subsequently, Boyarsky would go on make several public appearances and became somewhat of a spokesperson for the lore and story aspects of Diablo III.
Boyarsky was affectionately known as ‘LeBo’ in the Diablo fan community. A legendary gem called ‘Boyarsky’s Chip’ can be found in Diablo III as an homage. Its item description contains a reference to Fallout .
In April 2016, Boyarsky joined Obsidian Entertainment. [3] Soon after, Feargus Urquhart has confirmed that Boyarsky and Tim Cain are working together on an unannounced project. [4] Urquhart also stated that the duo were not working on then current Obsidian projects such as Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity or Armored Warfare . Boyarsky has described the project as his “dream game”.
During the 2018 Game Awards, Obsidian announced that the game Boyarsky and Cain have been working on is The Outer Worlds , a first-person science fiction action-RPG that takes place on a terraformed exoplanet. [5] [6] The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 25, 2019. [7]
When later asked why he left Interplay, Boyarsky commented that
Interplay had been a great place to work, and we felt that it was losing a lot of what we felt was great about it, and that they were making a lot of bad decisions that would destroy the company. We were about five or six years early on that, but we saw the writing on the wall. If Baldur's Gate hadn't hit big, Interplay might well have imploded much earlier, but we left about a year before BG was even released. [8]
After the Fallout IP was bought by Bethesda he said (in 2004):
To be perfectly honest, I was extremely disappointed that we did not get the chance to make the next Fallout game. This has nothing to do with Bethesda, it's just that we've always felt that Fallout was ours and it was just a technicality that Interplay happened to own it. It sort of felt as if our child had been sold to the highest bidder, and we had to just sit by and watch. Since I have absolutely no idea what their plans are, I can't comment on whether I think they're going in the right direction with it or not. [9]
| Title | Year | Role(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Castles II: Siege and Conquest | 1992 | Artist |
| Unnatural Selection | 1993 | Assistant artist |
| Stonekeep | 1995 | Lead artist |
| Fallout | 1997 | Art director, original game design |
| Fallout 2 | 1998 | Main story arc, quests, areas, characters |
| Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura | 2001 | CEO, project leader, art director, designer-writer |
| Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines | 2004 | CEO, project leader, art director, designer-writer |
| Diablo III | 2012 | Senior world designer |
| Diablo III: Reaper of Souls | 2014 | Senior world designer |
| The Outer Worlds | 2019 | Game director (with Tim Cain) |
Fallout is a media franchise of post-apocalyptic role-playing video games created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, at Interplay Entertainment. The series is set during the first half of the 3rd millennium, and its atompunk retrofuturistic setting and artwork are influenced by the post-war culture of the 1950s United States, with its combination of hope for the promises of technology and the lurking fear of nuclear annihilation. Fallout is regarded as a spiritual successor to Wasteland, a 1988 game developed by Interplay Productions.
Troika Games was an American video game developer co-founded by Jason Anderson, Tim Cain, and Leonard Boyarsky. The company was focused on role-playing video games between 1998 and 2005, best known for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
Black Isle Studios is a division of the developer and publisher Interplay Entertainment formed in 1996 that develops role-playing video games. It has published several games from other developers.
Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before becoming a freelance designer and writer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as Planescape: Torment, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and the Fallout series.
Obsidian Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Irvine, California and part of Xbox Game Studios. It was founded in June 2003, shortly before the closure of Black Isle Studios, by ex-Black Isle employees Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Chris Parker, Darren Monahan, and Chris Jones.
Feargus Urquhart is a Scottish-American video game designer and CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a 2004 action role-playing video game developed by Troika Games and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows. Set in White Wolf Publishing's World of Darkness, the game is based on White Wolf's role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade and follows a human who is killed and revived as a fledgling vampire. The game depicts the fledgling's journey through early 21st-century Los Angeles to uncover the truth behind a recently discovered relic that heralds the end of all vampires.
Joshua Eric Sawyer, more commonly known and credited as Josh Sawyer, J.E. Sawyer, or JSawyer, is an American video game designer, known for his work on role-playing video games.
Christopher "Chris" Taylor is a video game, board game and card game, developer originally from Southern California. Taylor is most famous for acting as lead designer for the original Fallout title for Interplay Entertainment, working alongside Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson. While at Interplay, Taylor contributed to the design of Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Stonekeep and Fallout 2. He also served as producer for The Lord of the Rings Online.
Van Buren was the codename of a canceled role-playing video game developed by Black Isle Studios. It was intended to be the third game in the mainline Fallout series. Set in the year 2253, the plot of Van Buren revolved around an escaped prisoner who would explore the American Southwest while being pursued by robotic prison guards. The main antagonist was a mad scientist named Victor Presper, who planned on using the prisoner as an inadvertent vector to spread a deadly virus. Gameplay would have included a mixture of real-time and turn-based combat. The player would explore the map with a team of non-playable character (NPC) companions. Each NPC would make their own independent decisions which would affect the story.
Fallout is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions, set in a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic world, decades after a nuclear war between the United States and China. Fallout's protagonist, the Vault Dweller, inhabits an underground nuclear shelter. The player must scour the surrounding wasteland for a computer chip that can fix the Vault's failed water supply system. They interact with other survivors, some of whom give them quests, and engage in turn-based combat.
Darren Monahan is the chief information officer and producer of Obsidian Entertainment and one of Obsidian's founders. Monahan works in the game industry, having worked for Interplay Entertainment in various capacities, including as a senior producer for Black Isle Studios, manager of quality assurance, and a programmer on many of Interplay's titles. As a producer, Monahan managed the development of six published products, including the entire Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series.
Timothy Cain is an American video game developer and YouTuber best known as the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of the 1997 video game Fallout. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
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.
Diablo is an action role-playing dungeon crawler video game series developed by Blizzard North and continued by Blizzard Entertainment after the North studio shut down in 2005. The series is made up of four core games: Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Diablo IV. Expansions include the third-party published Hellfire, which follows the first game; Lord of Destruction, published by Blizzard and released after the second game; Reaper of Souls, which follows the third game; and Vessel of Hatred, which follows the fourth game. Additional content is provided through story elements explored in other types of media forms.
Brian Mitsoda is an American video game designer and writer best known for his work on the 2004 game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. He is the founder of DoubleBear Productions.
Vault Boy is the mascot of the Fallout media franchise. Created by staff at Interplay Entertainment, the original owners of the Fallout intellectual property, Vault Boy was introduced in 1997's Fallout as an advertising character representing Vault-Tec, a fictional megacorporation that built a series of specialized fallout shelters throughout the United States prior to the nuclear holocaust that sets up the world state of the Fallout universe. Within the video game series, Vault Boy serves as a representation of the player character's statistical information within user interface (UI) menus, and is a recurring element in Vault-Tec products found throughout the fictional Fallout universe. In the 2024 Fallout television series, Vault Boy is depicted as having been inspired by Vault-Tec advertisements featuring fictional actor Cooper Howard.
Western role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in the Western world, including the Americas and Europe. They originated on mainframe university computer systems in the 1970s, were later popularized by titles such as Ultima and Wizardry in the early- to mid-1980s, and continue to be produced for modern home computer and video game console systems. The genre's "Golden Age" occurred in the mid- to late-1980s, and its popularity suffered a downturn in the mid-1990s as developers struggled to keep up with changing fashion, hardware evolution and increasing development costs. A later series of isometric role-playing games, published by Interplay Productions and Blizzard Entertainment, was developed over a longer time period and set new standards of production quality.
The Outer Worlds is a 2019 action role-playing game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Private Division. Set in an alternate future, the game takes place in Halcyon, a distant star system colonized by megacorporations. In the game, players assumes control of a passenger from a lost colony ship, who is revived by a mad scientist and tasked to rescue their fellow colonists and take down the corporations responsible for the colony's downfall. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and players can use combat, stealth, or dialog options when encountering potentially hostile non-playable characters. Players can make numerous dialog decisions which influence the branching story.
Deckard Cain is a fictional character who appears in the Diablo video game franchise by Blizzard Entertainment. Within the series, Cain is a prominent non player character who acts as an advisor and guide to the player character of the first three games, and represents the wise old man archetype who provides most of the in-game lore. Cain is the last surviving descendant of the original members of the Horadrim, an ancient order of magicians charged with trapping the series' primary antagonists within enchanted crystals and guarding them thereafter. Cain has appeared in series related media, and appears as a playable hero in the crossover multiplayer online battle arena video game Heroes of the Storm. The character is originally named after the winning entry of a fan contest organized by Blizzard and PC Gamer, and is voiced by Michael Gough for all media.
