You can learn some interesting things when you talk to game developers. You can learn, for instance, that Brian Fargo's grandfather was a minister back in the 1950s. Fargo never met his grandfather, but even so, he managed to get him into Wasteland 2. In a very unexpected way.
“He was a fire and brimstone preacher, hardcore, in the 50s. He would do revivals and make albums. He died of a heart attack very young. And so they recorded a record, which had that [chanting] cadence to it, very scratchy,” Fargo told us during a wide-ranging interview at GDC. “I was like, I've got to do something with this, so I lifted the tracks out and I gave them to [composer] Mark Morgan. So when you hear the Wasteland 2 music and you hear the preacher stuff, that’s actually my grandfather. I like doing things like that, little stuff that only we get, but it gives it some depth.”
The track in question, I assume, is Twisted Preacher, embedded below, which contains a few instances of indistinct, but unmistakably intense, sermonizing underneath the music. It's the sort of thing that could be a licensed clip, or maybe some heavily-edited DIY work; the fact that it's a real preacher, and Fargo's forebear to boot, is fascinating.
The full, lengthy interview, which also includes Obsidian's Josh Sawyer and ArtCraft's Gordon Walton, will be up tomorrow. I strongly recommend that you not miss it.
