One of my most cherished YouTube videos is this strange 2007 number from a guy with 15 followers and the handle "FilmNoir82". It shows off a tech demo for an unreleased, post-apocalyptic RPG (with music ripped from David Lynch's 1984 Dune) by Troika Games, a beloved, but short lived studio founded by former Fallout developers Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson.
The demo looks like an alternate interpretation of Fallout in full 3D, distinct from both Black Isle's "Van Buren" prototype of Fallout 3 and Bethesda's later vision of the setting. It appears as though you'd primarily play from an isometric perspective, but the demo also shows the player zooming into a first person view, possibly allowing for both immersive first person exploration and zoomed-out tactical combat.
I always interpreted this demo as Troika's stab at Fallout 3 before getting outbid on the license by Bethesda, but in a vlog on his ever-informative YouTube channel, Troika co-founder Tim Cain revealed that the project would have been very much its own thing. Though Cain is uncertain about exact details, it sounds like the Fallout license was out of Troika's reach before it put much work into the project, code-named "Epic," and the team shifted gears into making a bespoke setting.
And that setting sounds rad as hell. Epic would have been set on a world that resembles ours in many respects, but with a planetary ring and multiple moons resulting in "crazy tides" according to Cain. Whether this world was a human space colony or an alternate fantasy universe all together is probably something the game itself would have revealed in its main quest, alongside the reason for its post-apocalyptic state.
Unfortunately, Troika was unable to successfully pitch Epic to publishers, and the studio shut down in early 2005. More than anything else, it's Epic's setting that sets my imagination on fire: this very familiar world that's slowly revealed to be extremely alien. It reminds me a lot of how Disco Elysium's uncanny familiarity belies its alternate physics and history, and an apocalypse in a fantasy or far-out sci-fi world is way more appealing to me than some kind of boring old I Am Legend or The Division "plainclothes tacticool guys in an overgrown city" afterscape.
