How Brian Fargo's fire-and-brimstone preacher grandfather ended up in Wasteland 2

Note: not actually Brian Fargo's grandfather.

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.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.