Recently, Todd Howard spoke with Game Informer journalists. During a conversation about the Fallout franchise, he shared memories of how he got the disc of the original 1997 game.
It turns out he had to steal from his own brother. He told young Howard about Fallout and added that he should definitely play it.
Then the creator took a radical step - he just took the disc and quietly took it for himself:
I was working at Bethesda when [the first Fallout] came out. To be honest, my brother was the first to play it. And he tells me: "Have you tried Fallout yet?" And I replied: "Not yet, I haven't had time." He said: "Be sure to play it." As a result, I just stole the disc from him and never returned it.
The first Fallout impressed Todd Howard:
I really liked the atmosphere of this game. There were already tabletop role-playing games with post-apocalyptic elements - like Gamma World and, of course, Wasteland, which in some ways were the predecessor to Fallout. I was always interested in the rules of the world, its structure. In Fallout, they were simply brilliant - and how the gameplay works, how the world is structured and its atmosphere itself. It was all very original. And this Vault Boy, who winks at the player at the right moments... Yes, I played [the first Fallout] to death.