Game developer Interplay was robbed of its chance to create the Mad Max: Fury Road game

A GAME developer has spoken out about how it was robbed of the rights to make the Mad Max: Fury Road video game.

A GAME developer claims it was robbed of the rights to make the Mad Max: Fury Road video game.

During the late 1990s, Interplay Entertainment — the studio behind Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Wasteland — was given the rights to develop the video game for the next instalment of Mad Max.

Interplay founder Brian Fargo said the concept first came about after he shared a flight with the film’s director George Miller.

“I got to fly with him to Whistler, Canada, on the Universal private jet — because Universal used to own half of Interplay — and spend three hours with him,” he told Kotaku.

“The Road Warrior was my favourite movie for a decade. I’d watch it over and over again so I was a huge fan of Miller’s. [He] was familiar with Wasteland and Fallout and loved the work we’d done. So half of the ride was us fanboying and half was ‘OK, let’s do something’.”

The style of Fallout would have suited the Mad Max: Fury Road game.

After making headway on the flight, Fargo planned to meet Miller at his studio in Australia to further broker the deal between the two parties.

“He’d taken over an old abandoned movie theatre,” he said.

“He kept the huge middle area where the theatre was open and turned all the other parts into offices.”

It was during this meeting that Miller let Fargo read the script for Mad Max: Fury Road, which inspired the early stages of development for the game.

Margo said the game was being designed as a party-based RPG combining the style of the developer’s earlier games with Miller’s unique vision.

“We’d have had to have worked vehicles in, they’re such a critical part of his world,” he said.

Things were going swimmingly for Interplay until word started to spread about the development of the Mad Max game.

Fargo said EA games muscled in on the project and offered $20 million dollars for the game rights, which Miller gratefully accepted.

George Miller would never see a cent of the $20 million promised by EA.

Karma would come back to get both EA and Miller, when the development of the game was shut down because of problems with the film’s production.

“The movie had lots of fits and starts,” Fargo told Kotaku.

“The movie was at Fox for some of the time, it got announced and then it got canned. Then Warner Brothers ended up getting the rights, they had a relationship with Miller that goes way back.”

With Warner now in charge of the production of the film, the game rights were stripped from EA.

Coinciding with the film’s production years later, Warner awarded the game licence to developer Avalanche, completely snubbing both Interplay and EA.

The Mad Max: Fury Road game is scheduled for release in September.

Originally published as Game developer Interplay was robbed of its chance to create the Mad Max: Fury Road game