Meet the Fallout 3 devs - Ben Carnow Ben " Specialty Bread " Carnow What ' s your job at Bethesda ? I am a character artist . I work in Max , Zbrush and photoshop to translate the concept drawings into fully realized 3d meshes . Primarily what I work on right now is armor / clothing , although hopefully when I get some more experience I will be permitted to steal some of the awesome creature jobs . What I love about my job is the challenge of retaining the anatomical detail beneath garments , and of capturing the essence of the materials I am depicting so that metal looks like metal , leather looks like leather , rust looks like rust and so on . What prior projects have you worked on ? Fallout 3 will be my first game ever ( so I better not muck it up . ) I have only been at Bethesda since late February , so I am pretty new , and this thread has actually been a great way for me to learn a bit more about my coworkers , particularly ones I don ' t interact with on a regular basis . Prior to coming here I was a student at SCAD , prior to that I was an adolescent , prior to that I was clipped off of my progenitor . 3 ) What have you drawn on for inspiration in developing Fallout 3 ? Books , movies , music , etc would be fine , if you don ' t want to name any games . I have love for a whole lot of post apocalyptic media , most of which has already been mentioned . The Mad Max movies definitely provide a bit of character art flavor , although not really very retro - future . An artist who is a big inspiration to me that I haven ' t seen mentioned in this series of threads before is concept artist Marko Djurdjevic . He does tons of post apocalyptic art , and although a lot of it has a slightly more fantasy angle to it than fallout his character designs are always incredibly original and inspiring , and his skill with anatomy is just gorgeous . Our own concept artist is awesome too ! How is the work - environment ? Is it competitive or co - op ? Do the different teams talk together ? Work is definitely very cooperative , with maybe a little bit of friendly competitiveness within the group ( Joooooonaaaaaaaah ! ) There is a lot of inter - team communication , there would really be no hope of producing anything but a buggy pile of crap without it . What is your favorite type of game to play ( RTS , FPS , RPG etc ) I used to play a lot of RTSes , but these days i mostly play anything that tickles my fancy . Favorites include the Fallout series ( duh ) , Baldur ' s Gate , Halflife 1 + 2 , Psychonauts , Grim Fandango , Sacrifice , Relentless / Twinsen ' s Odyssey , and a bunch of other stuff . How long have you been playing Fallout , and how would you describe your feelings towards the franchise ? Fallout was a really huge game in my adolescent years . The game allowed you so many choices in comparison to the other games I had played previously , and it had such incredible atmosphere to it . I didn ' t have a computer that could really play it at the time it came out , so me and my friend Noah would take turns directing characters through the waste , huddled around the warmth of the monitor in his dank and freezing basement ( why his family kept the computer down there I have no idea . ) Each day I would leave the basement hacking and wheezing with lungs full of mold spores , barely able to function , and the next day I would return to do it all over again . These days when I want to play Fallout I just break out a sample of cultivated mold and inhale the sweet smell of the wastes . You guys should try it , feeling like you have inhaled a lot of radioactive spores and are dying of cancer or are perhaps about to sprout a small mushroom out of your forehead really helps to put you in character . Considering that much of the game will probably be in a wild wasteland , do any of you spend much time hiking , camping , etc , and if so where ? Not something that I do with enormous frequency , but I get out to national parks and the like every once in a while to sketch landscapes . What ' s the last game you bought ? Did you like it ? The last game I bought was God Hand for the PS2 , and I loved it . It is an absolutely ridiculous 3rd person beat - em - up that has a totally ludicrous concept and embraces it . The game puts you against loads and loads of ridiculous and varied enemies . My favorites include giant punks that can use their mohawks as projectile weapons , and fat people with cannons on their backs . The atmosphere is aided by really really cheesey voice - acting , which gives the game a poorly dubbed kung - fu movie sort of feel . If anyone is thinking of picking it up I would warn you that parts of the game are obscenely difficult , and I doubt I will ever work up the courage to attempt the game on hard mode . What games are you looking forward to on the horizon ? Bioshock is definitely my # 1 . System Shock 2 holds a place in my heart , and this looks to do everything that it did , but better . The atmosphere in SS2 was so incredible that I cannot wait to see how quickly they can make me shit myself with graphics that are actually good instead of a low - poly pixel mishmash . Children need meat to groooooooow . Other than videogames , what are your interests ? ( Board games , reading , music , etc ) I do a lot of more traditional art in my free time ( drawing , painting , a little sculpting . ) I am not yet close to where I want to be as an artist , and doing more of the traditional stuff helps me tons in Max / Photoshop . I love terrible ( and even sometimes not terrible ) horror and kung - fu films , sometimes at the same time , as in Mr Vampire , and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires ( with Peter Cushing ! ) I listen to mostly industrial and death rock music , sometimes some noise too . I love to read , although these days I usually end up listening to audiobooks while I draw / paint , dedicated reading time is hard to come by . My favorite authors are probably Kurt Vonnegut and Phillip K Dick . Have you played the Van Buren Alpha ? If so , what were your feelings on it ? I haven ' t played it yet , but definitely have plans to . Favorite anime ? I don ' t really watch a whole lot of anime anymore , but Berserk holds a special place in my heart for having the most bleak and horrible ending ever ( yeah I know it goes on in the manga , but it is still an awesome mind * @ & % . ) On that note the Berserk manga is good , and it has been going on for so long that if you look at the early stuff and the stuff much later you can see enormous improvement in the artist . I love looking at stuff like that . Post apocalyptic anime ? Well , the Gunm manga had some decent post - apocalyptic atmosphere , and I enjoyed it a lot overall ( never seen the anime , heard it is disappointing ) . I ' ve seen Trigun but really it pissed the hell out of me because there isn ' t a single moment in the entire span of the show that is as cool as the opening credits . They totally blew their animation wad there , and everything else in the show is just a pale shade of it . Plus I hate whiny pacifist characters ( they get used waaaay too much in anime ) , but that is personal taste . Quite a task . . . I would tell you that tasks of this grand importance are not given to those of my experience level , but are instead handled by those with years of experience who know what the crap they are doing . I handle less important things such as the armor made of dirt ( with realistic soil erosion ! ) and the armor made of velcro and bubble - wrap . Why that nick , man ? The name Specialty Bread comes from an MST3k short in which they mocked a short " educational " video intended to teach prospective bread salesmen how to engender good will with the grocers upon which they ply their trade . At one point in the movie specialty breads were mentioned , but never elaborated upon , leading Mike ( I think ? ) and the robots to perform a short skit demonstrating different kinds of specialty bread . " This type of bread comes to a sharp point . That would be , a specialty bread . " Anyway , as to why I picked it for my username , Grudd only knows . Source . Meet the Fallout 3 devs - Ben Carnow @ No Mutants Allowed