Bethesda wasn't always synonymous with Fallout. A certain generation of hardcore PC RPG fans resented the studio's increasingly mainstream, console-friendly take on role-playing titles, and turning an isometric classic into something like Fallout 3 – ungenerously referred to ahead of launch as "Oblivion with guns" – was treated as something akin to blasphemy. No one felt the pressure more than the developers at Bethesda.

"There was a section of the Fallout fandom that felt that a team famous for making elves and fantasy games should not be touching this series," as Angela Browder, associate art producer at Bethesda at the time, says in Edge magazine issue 419. "It was surprising to us how much hate we got. They were not very happy that we had bought this license."

But the very stature of the Fallout license among RPG enthusiasts made Bethesda's purchase a "no-brainer," according to lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. "I remember talking to Todd Howard, and he asked me, 'What do you think about this?' And it was like, 'Come on. It's Fallout.'"

Originally, Bethesda merely licensed the Fallout IP from original developer Interplay, but when the latter studio's financial situation became dire in the '00s, it needed to start selling off its assets. Troika Games, founded by some of the original leads of the first two Fallout games, considered making a bid for the IP, but the studio had no hope of matching Bethesda's $6 million offer.

But just because Bethesda's Fallout looked a whole lot different from Interplay's didn't mean the new group of developers weren't trying to treat the source material with respect. Fallout 3's story, where you work to provide clean water to the Capital Wasteland, is a direct tribute to the original game's quest to repair your home's water purifier.

Pagliarulo says inspiration for Fallout 3's story struck him as he was looking at a map of Washington DC and the Tidal Basin. "And that was it, right there: 'It's got to be about water. It's got to go back to those original themes of Fallout 1 where it's just about survival and just about something simple.'"

There are still Fallout fans who swear by the original two Interplay games, but if you measure success by numbers, there's no denying that Bethesda has had the last laugh. The audience for Fallout games became orders of magnitude bigger in the Bethesda era, and the fandom is only growing with the success of the Fallout TV show.

"You look at the amount of fans that Fallout had for 1 and 2, which expanded with 3 and expanded with 4, and now you have a television show," Browder concludes. "That, to me, is the success of it – all these people who became lifers."

Old-school fans might want to look away from our ranking of the best Fallout games.

As of roughly 2:05 pm EST on Monday, Anthem is really, truly dead. In a world of fan-run private server game resurrections, however, does it have to stay dead? Maybe not. At the end of a lengthy tell-all video about Anthem's legendarily troubled development (via Eurogamer), former BioWare executive producer and Anthem project lead Mark Darrah indicated that the tech for running Anthem locally once existed—and could, theoretically, exist again.

It would, however, rely on either third-party ingenuity or uncharacteristic generosity from EA. I'll let you decide which is more likely.

Anthem's live service network design had a client-server structure: To play, you and every other player would've had to connect to servers that handled the game's logic. Your PC didn't have to do the thinking. It just had to handle the results and make them look pretty.

According to Darrah, however, Anthem actually had code for running locally—meaning players' own machines would host network sessions that other players could connect to—until very late in development.

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah said. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

Darrah then lays out an alternate future for Anthem involving reworking the game into a singleplayer with AI-driven companions and retrofitting the game with tech that would bring its visuals up to current-day standards—all of which, he estimates, would cost a further investment of $10 million that EA "would almost definitely not spend" on a game it's been eager to cut from the balance sheet for years.

While Darrah admits his idea of an ideal Anthem future is informed by his "singleplayer biases," I think the knowledge that Anthem once ran code for local hosting is a glimpse at a possible future where particularly devoted Anthem diehards cobble together their own solution for a player-driven private server revival.

The quickest way for that to happen would be for EA to provide the aforementioned local hosting code from Anthem's development, which I'd wager is just as likely as Darrah's singleplayer scheme—by which I mean it'll never happen. Instead, the fact that Anthem could once run locally just makes me think there's a better chance than ever that appropriately skilled enthusiasts could write a replacement of their own.

Player-run replacement for EA multiplayer services have happened before. The modders behind Northstar have offered an alternative to Titanfall 2's long-suffering official servers, while Battlefront 2 has its own player-operated multiplayer replacement in Kyber, a conversion mod with its own dedicated servers that's currently in open beta.

As a live service game with pseudo-MMO trappings, a private server resurrection for Anthem would likely entail more involved traffic analysis and engineering knowhow. But however small the chance is, if I know anything about dead PC Games, it's that somebody's going to try. Perhaps, someday, the freelancers will fly again.