Jesse Heinig

Jesse Heinig (born July 20, 1973) is a developer who worked at Interplay Entertainment as a programmer and designer on the original Fallout. He was also credited with game design for the Fallout 2 SPECIAL system. More recently, Heinig was a developer on Winter of Atom, a sourcebook for Fallout: The Roleplaying Game.

Career[]

Among other things, he was responsible for scripting and designing the companions, including Ian and Tycho (originally, the engine did not really have support for party members and they were not in the original design), as well as ZAX. He was also one of the people responsible for creating the SPECIAL character system, for which he was credited also on Fallout 2, despite not being directly involved in the development of the game.

After Fallout, he went on to work at White Wolf as a developer for their role-playing games, working primarily on Mage: The Ascension, Kindred of the East and Mind's Eye Theatre, with some contributions to Vampire: The Masquerade. Later, he worked at Decipher and headed the development of the Star Trek role-playing game until Decipher's RPG division was eventually closed. He spent some time at Activision as a production coordinator on Call of Duty 2 and then went back to college to finish a Computer Science degree.

Employment history[]

From	To	Company	Role
1997	1998	Interplay Entertainment
1998	2009	White Wolf
2010	2024	Cryptic Studios	Senior Content Designer
2024	Present	Blizzard Entertainment	Designer

Credits[]

Fallout series[]

Year	Title	Credited as/for
1997	Fallout	Programmer, additional design
1998	Fallout 2	SPECIAL game system design
2023	Fallout: The Roleplaying Game	Winter of Atom sourcebook

Other work[]

Year	Title	Credited as/for

Quotes[]

“One of the challenges of developing the divergent future culture of Fallout is that while what we see in post-nuclear North America is the remains of a culture obsessed with '50s Americana, that culture was doing so in 2077, still some way into our future (for now..). Besides just laser guns and power armor, there are elements of Fallout that culturally reflect pieces of US culture that postdate the '50s but their popularity simply wasn't peaked like '50s Amencana did as of 2077. For instance, in Junktown, the character Ismarc sings a badly mangled rendition of Head Like A Hole, with came out in 1989. Presumably this means that Pretty Hate Machine cate out at some point in the Fallout universe, in some form, but by 2077 nobody cared about the Industrial Revolution or post-punk any more, they were all big into swing and jazz, much like how there was one month during the Pandemic in our real world where the internet was obsessed with sea shanties. So, does anime exist in the Fallout universe? Yes. What form does it take? What's popular? How big is anime in 2077? We don't really have enough information to know, other than knowing that it wasn't reflected in mainstream US pop culture when the bombs fell and arrested the cultural symbols of the US. in the form of crumbling billboards and scorched ad pages.”— Jesse Heinig, Modiphius Discord

External links[]

Jesse Heinig's developer profile at No Mutants Allowed
Jesse Heinig at the White Wolf Wiki