Trying to find an old Vault13.net interview with Feargus Urquhart

[David Cernat]

Hi there.

For archival purposes, I'm trying to gather all the interviews done by Black Isle developers in the old days, especially the ones mentioning Van Buren. Although I've been able to track down most of them, there's one that eludes me.

On the 2nd of April 2002, Vault13.net posted an interview with Feargus Urquhart. This was the URL for it, but it was never archived by the Internet Archive:

http://www.vault13.net/articles.php?id=38

At the time, Shacknews mentioned the interview and provided a brief excerpt from it:

Initially, I decided in March/April of 1999 that we needed to start working on project other than Fallout 3. This was for a number of reasons, however the top two were the following. 1) Interplay looked like it was still having financial problems and the development on Fallout 3 was not moving forward very quickly. So, to solve both problems I decided that the team should start working on the game that would become Icewind Dale 2. 2) We talked about sharing technology between the Stonekeep 2 project and Fallout 3. To make this possible we reassigned Chris Holland and the other programmer that we had brought over from another division around the beginning of the year to Stonekeep 2 to get that technology moving forward faster.

The next time we had the chance to start Fallout 3 was after the completion of Torment in late 1999. As I've talked about before, we had pretty much promised Fallout 3 to the team that went onto Icewind Dale, so I was not inclined to have the ex-Torment team work on that. Plus, the ex-Torment team was more interested in coming up with a Fantasy based game using SPECIAL - which was the game that became TORN. What that all meant is that there was no one to work on Fallout 3 at that point, because everyone from Torment either went to the project that would become TORN or onto Icewind Dale.

Unfortunately, Vault13.net closed down just several weeks later and all of its content was lost:

There's also a thread from August 2003 on RPG Codex that briefly mentions the interview. Apparently, Saint Proverbius was the interviewer.

I recently asked Saint Proverbius if he happens to still have a copy of the interview, but he told me he doesn't because he's gone through several hard-drives since then.

I know this is a long shot, but did any of you who were around back then happen to save it knowing that Vault13.net was closing down?