For the next two days, the classic post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout will be a free download from GoG.com. Looks like it's time to explore the wastes again.

In over fifteen years working as an artist in the video game industry, Joseph Sanabria has been in the employ of companies like Obsidian, THQ and Rockstar.

For those developers, he's produced art for games such as Terminator 3 and, awesomely, the Neverhood series. Most recently, he served as art director for Fallout: New Vegas, which meant he was the man responsible for defining the artistic direction of not just the sequel, but its downloadable content as well.

In the gallery above you'll find a selection of his work over the years, both personal and professional, but you can see plenty more at Joseph's personal site.

Since the early days of the RPG, role-playing video games have allowed players to sacrifice intelligence points to further some more important statistic. Fallout is one of the only ones that treats you like the moron you've made.

The Fallout series is a wealth of side-splitting humor, or at least it was until recently. What's amazing is there are little treats like this exchange between a particularly dim-witted Vault Dweller and Vault 13's Overseer that are completely hidden from players until they decide to screw around with their stats.

I used to an incredibly stupid character in my old Dungeons & Dragons campaign: a Barbarian named Thog. Sometimes he referred to himself as Thog the Thog, because he couldn't come up with an appropriate adjective. In retrospect he probably didn't know any.

My interactions with my Dungeon Master (the father of the girl I was dating at the time) played out pretty much like this. To see this level of flexibility in a video game, especially one released nearly 15 years ago—it's inspirational.

Or it should have been.

Fallout 1 low intelligence character returns water chip. [YouTube via Reddit]

Last night, Obsidian's Chris Avellone tweeted an interesting detail about his roleplaying game Fallout: New Vegas.

"[Fallout: New Vegas] was a straight payment, no royalties," he said in response to a fan question about the game's financial success. "Only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn't."

Metacritic, an aggregation website that collects scores from selected review sites and compiles them as a weighted average, currently lists the Xbox 360 version of Fallout: New Vegas at 84 (out of 100). The PC version is also listed at 84. The PlayStation 3 version of the game is listed at 82.

In other words, Obsidian may have missed its bonus and lost out on a significant amount of money because of a single point.

We've reached out to New Vegas publisher Bethesda, the company that financed the game, to try to confirm Avellone's statement, but they would not comment. If the New Vegas designer's tweet is accurate, then Bethesda put a portion of Obsidian's financial fate in the hands of a select group of game reviewers.

Finances have been an issue for Obsidian—earlier this week, the independent studio had to let go of 30 staff because a game it had been developing for the next Xbox was cancelled. So a potential Metacritic bonus may have been no small matter.

I understand the logic used by publishers like Bethesda when they dole out bonuses based on Metacritic numbers. As an aggregation of critic review scores, a Metacritic average can be an important benchmark for the perceived quality of a game. And it certainly makes sense that a boss would want to reward its employees based on the quality of their work.

Except Metacritic scores are not objective measures of quality. The Xbox 360 Metacritic page for Fallout: New Vegas consists of 81 reviews. If Obsidian's bonuses were determined by this aggregator, they were not based on the game's quality—they were based on 81 peoples' opinions of the game's quality.

Look through Metacritic's list of critic reviews. The list of selected websites is comprised of both professional and volunteer reviewers. Some write for the web. Others write for print. Some scores are weighted more heavily than others (Metacritic does not publicly discuss the formula it uses to create its averages). Some scores are even treated differently than others—a 7 at Game Informer does not mean the same thing as a 7 at Edge, for example.

Many of the reviews attacked the game for its bugs and glitches, many of which were fixed in subsequent patches and downloadable content packs. While reviewers may have been justified in marking down scores for the buggy product, those scores may not have been relevant after a month, or even after a week. Most review outlets don't change their scores once patches have been released. Is that something Bethesda took into consideration?

There is no such thing as an objectively good game. Nor is there such thing as an objectively bad game. We all secretly hate some games that are beloved by the rest of the world, and everyone has their favorite black sheep. I've strongly disliked some highly-rated games, like Dragon Age 2, and fallen deeply in love with some poorly-rated games, like Suikoden V. Should my personal opinion really be condensed into a mathematical formula and used to decide somebody else's bonus?

At Kotaku, we don't use review scores. Metacritic doesn't count our reviews. What if that made the difference? What if an outlet's choice of reviewer changed everything? What if a developer's bonus was determined by a single person's arbitrary distinction between a 7.8 and a 7.9? What if a game studio faced financial trouble after it missed its bonus by a single point?

This isn't healthy for anybody involved. It's not healthy for a reviewer to have to worry whether his criticism will directly affect peoples' jobs. It's not healthy for developers to focus on pleasing reviewers, rather than pleasing consumers. It's not healthy for individual opinions to impact bonuses and salaries.

Publishers need a better tool for measuring a game's quality. I don't know what that tool is. I don't know that it exists. But using Metacritic to hand out bonuses is dangerous—for developers, reviewers, and, quite frankly, you.

(Disclosure: While working at Wired.com, I gave Fallout: New Vegas a 9/10. My review appears on the game's Metacritic page.)

The original Fallout was a gamble that paid off big-time; it set in place a tone, gameplay philosophy and fiction that is still going strong today. Fallout games are best known for their evocative, funny, dark and violent post-apocalyptic world. But it could have been another kind of game entirely.

In a Fallout post-mortem at the Game Developers Conference, Tim Cain, the producer, designer and lead programmer described an alternate version of the game's story that could have come to be a reality.

"You started in the modern world," Cain said. "You traveled back in time, you killed the monkey that would evolve into humans, you went through space travel, you went to the future, which was ruled by dinosaurs, you were exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back to the original timeline that you restored to full, and came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend."

Okay, so. As much as I love the idea of a fantasy planet that magically returns things to how they were, allowing you to save your girlfriend, I think my favorite part about this is that you "killed the monkey that evolved into humans." What?

"It's weird to hear me talk about it now," Cain said, "but we really were going to go with this. And I think one of the other producers kinda slapped me and said, 'There's no way you're going to get this storyline made, it's not going to get through, you could work on it for years and no one would ever do it.'

"I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we had done this game, and believe Scott Campbell may have it written down somewhere. I'd love to see it, to see what we thought was cool eighteen years ago."

Well dang, I would love to see that too. I'm glad that Fallout exists and everything, but I'd also like to see what the guys who made it would have done with a time-traveling Dinosaur story.

Some other notes from the talk:

• Before they came up with the (great) name Fallout, the following alternate names were toyed with: Aftermath, Survivor, and the particularly terrible/on-the-nose Postnuclear Adventure.
• The game initially failed certification for Windows 95, but for a very strange reason. Namely, Fallout failed Windows 95 cert because the game worked on Windows NT. To get certified on Windows 95, the game was supposed to "fail gracefully" on WindowsNT. Instead it worked. Cain said he called microsoft and said "It fails so gracefully that it doesn't fail at all." Which didn't fly, The solution? Go into the game and code it to detect Windows NT and just sort of… fail. Heh.
• The team had a rule about references: If a pop cultural reference was going into the game, it had to be unnoticeable by someone who didn't get it. As an example, Cain said that the "Slayer" perk was because Chris [Jones] was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Fallout got in trouble with the folks at Steve Jackson games (who owned the GURPS role-playing system the game was based on) because of the design, art and violence. For a while, it looked like the game would be cancelled as a result. In the end, GURPS was torn out, and they redesigned and coded the game in two weeks. I'm not exactly sure how we did it, my memory of that time is vague. But we did it. The systems behind all of Fallout, with the exception of perks, was done in two weeks.
• For some reason, the game was submitted for a "T" rating, even though it contained drugs, prostitution, and child-murder. So, when the ESRB saw that, they of course rated it "M."
• There wasn't that much drama around the child-killing in America, but in Europe, the game wouldn't have made it to shelves. There wasn't time to re-code the game, so they simply deleted all of the kids from the disk.
• People refer to Fallout as a game from an isometric perspective, but Cain pointed out that the perspective is in fact "Cavalier Oblique."
• Cain worked on the game by himself for a year, before getting two team members—a scripter and a coder, both of whom were named "Jason." People referred to them as "Tim and the Jasons."
• They originally wanted the Inkblots' "I Don't Want to Set The World on Fire" to be the game's theme song, but couldn't get it due to licensing reasons. Instead, they went with "Maybe," and it would up working better for the tone of the game. And, much later down the road, "I Don't Want to Set The World on Fire" became the theme of Fallout 3.
• Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats system was originally called A.C.E.L.I.P.S. I wasn't entirely sure whether or not Cain was kidding about this.

For those whose first foray into Tamriel came this year with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the series' maker will offer the preceding entry, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion combined with another outstanding role-playing game, Fallout 3. The combo will be $29.99 on Xbox 360, $19.99 on PC in March.

What about PS3? Bethesda Game Studios' Pete Hines told Joystiq that they aren't allowed to release the combo for that console yet. "We will continue to work to try to change that," he said. "but at present it is still not approved. We would like to release a PS3 version a well."

Fallout 3 and Oblivion unite in double pack on April 3 [Joystiq]

Who could forget the Tunnel Snakes, the dorkiest, least menacing group of post-apocalyptic greaser wanna-be gangsters to ever grace a role-playing game? I sure couldn't. And who could forget this classic video, which though it's a few years old, still holds up remarkably well?

Not Jenn Frank, anyway, who was kind enough to remind me of this video by YouTuber ElevateYourLevel, which remixes... well... dude, am I really going to explain what the video is to you? No. Maybe you've already heard it. But hey, this is Kotaku Melodic, and we like to listen to stuff! So let's listen again.

Tunnel Snakes rule!
We're the Tunnel Snakes!
That's us!
And we Rule!

I think I speak for everyone when I say: Yeah you guys rule!

If you have a pulse, this track will make you want to put on a leather jacket (be sure to slide it under your Pip-Boy!), take to the vault hallways, and dance, dance, dance.

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Tunnel Snakes Rule! [YouTube via Infinite Lives]