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It's well-known trivia among Fallout tragics like myself that the videogame was originally designed with the rules of GURPS, a tabletop game whose name stood for Generic Universal Role-Play System, published by Steve Jackson Games. (That's American Steve Jackson, not the British Steve Jackson who co-founded Games Workshop.) A deal between Fallout studio Interplay and Steve Jackson Games fell through though, the two parting ways without either side seeming clear on what the disagreement was about.

For his part, Steve Jackson has said he didn't even realize there was a problem until someone in the press rang him up to ask for a quote about the deal ending. On the other side, various Interplay staff have mentioned Jackson's distaste for the violent opening cutscene as a significant part of the dispute.

In a recent video on the history of Fallout's Vault Boy, the game's co-creator Tim Cain points out the cartoon mascot was another of the things Jackson objected to. It's tough to imagine Fallout without its poster boy now, and as Cain explains in the video, having consistent cartoons for the RPG's many skills and perks that were readable even at icon size was incredibly useful. They made the right choice in keeping him.

At the time, PC Gamer's RPG columnist Michael Wolf spoke to Interplay's Feargus Urquhart to ask what Jackson objected to. Wolf wrote in the April 1988 issue, "He didn't like the violence in the introduction, Urquhart says; he wanted to make the game's characters bigger, with more details on the weapons; and he didn't like the little characters that represent the different skills in the game—in fact, he wanted those Monopoly-style cartoon characters pulled out. After wrangling back and forth with the developers and going over the contract (which apparently said Jackson had control over the environment in which the license is used—pretty vague), Jackson basically said that if Interplay went ahead with Fallout as is, he'd take action. Rather than dealing with red tape, Interplay dropped the license."

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame. %!s()

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Matthew Loh

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Donald Trump's dinner with China's leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday was a glitzy gathering of the biggest names in tech.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said during a fireside chat at the New York Stock Exchange that she will be attending Thursday's White House event, joining executives expected to include Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Plenty is riding on the talks. Washington and Beijing are negotiating amid a trade truce, with tariffs, critical minerals, and semiconductors among the issues at stake. The US has also proposed a channel for the two countries to notify each other about significant AI safety incidents, which remains under discussion.

"I think technology is one of those areas where we rely on the global ecosystem to come together," Su told Fox Business's Liz Claman in a fireside chat on Wednesday, adding she is "honored" to join the White House dinner.

"So, yes, I think we're anxiously looking at what will come out of it," Su said. "And the truth is, we want to ensure that there's good stability across the global ecosystem as it relates to technology."

The seating arrangement

In clockwise order, Trump's table consisted of himself, first lady Melania Trump, Musk, Su and her spouse, Daniel Lin, Jensen Huang and his spouse, Lori Huang, former Apple CEO Tim Cook, China's first lady Peng Liyuan, and China's leader Xi Jinping.

Vice President JD Vance and Usha Vance were seen seated at a different table to the right.

Altman spotted chatting with Mark Zuckerberg

The two tech CEOs have both recently weighed in on AI safety issues, as the topic is expected to be discussed with China's leader.

Altman has backed setting shared safety standards, including rules for when companies should slow or stop developing more powerful models, while Zuckerberg has said that AI labs have strong incentives to make their models safe and can decide for themselves when to slow down.

Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO who also led the call for more cautious AI development, is notably absent from the dinner.

Jensen Huang spoke to other guests at the center table

Huang, dressed in more traditional business attire, was seated at the main table alongside Trump and Xi.

Nvidia has felt the tech rivalry between the US and China acutely over the past few years. After Washington imposed new export restrictions on Nvidia's H20 chips in April 2025, the company said it missed out on $2.5 billion in shipments that quarter and took a $4.5 billion charge tied to unsold inventory and purchase commitments.

As recently as August, Nvidia was still assuming no China data center chip revenue in its forecast.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk mingled with guests, including Anna Brockman

Musk and Brockman, who is the spouse of OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman, are both heavyweight Trump donors.

Musk, in particular, holds major business interests in China due to Tesla's Gigafactory in Shanghai, which produces about half of the automaker's deliveries.

The world's richest man said earlier this month, during a podcast appearance, that the US and China should agree to peer review or test AI models from the leading firms in each other's countries.

Musk's SpaceX is also arguably the single most important company to the US space race against China, providing the bulk of American orbital launches and maintaining the world's largest satellite constellation.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Secretary of State Marco Rubio

The Google CEO was seen having an animated conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Google, one of the leading AI labs in the US, is investing heavily in AI capacity, with a total capex forecast of $195 billion to $205 billion this year. That's higher than most of the rest of Big Tech, except for Amazon, which estimates $220 billion in total capex in 2026.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos

Amazon doesn't operate its marketplace in China, which has its own, far more domestically successful e-commerce platforms.

But the country has become a major supply and export hub for Amazon, to the point that the company built a global warehousing and distribution network this year in three major Chinese shipping ports to funnel goods to the US.

Bezos and Sánchez were just two representatives of America's corporate elite invited to Thursday's dinner — lead executives for BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, LVMH, and Lockheed Martin were also among those present.

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Katherine Li

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Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career,  the future of work, and how AI is changing hiring practices and workplace trends.Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature.  Email Katherine at [email protected] and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. 

Matthew Loh

You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.

Matthew is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau. He covers the defense industry, military technology, and evolving tactics in Ukraine, the US, and the Asia-Pacific region.He joined the team in June 2021, previously focusing on internet crime and labor, examining how these issues impact modern society in Asia, with a particular emphasis on China.Matthew's previous work has been featured in the South China Morning Post, as well as Singaporean news companies TODAY and The Business Times.

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• list 1 of 3Bomb attack at Pakistan mosque kills at least 31 people
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There has been no official confirmation from either country involved.

The Afghan government said on Thursday that it would deliver an “appropriate response” to Pakistani air attacks on 10 locations in Afghanistan earlier in the day.

The strikes were in response to a “deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones” on Wednesday, Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on Thursday.

Tarar said in a post on his X account that Pakistan’s aerial and drone attacks hit “terrorist hideouts and support infrastructure including drone launching and storage sites”.

He also posted a video said to show the military strikes on the Afghan sites.

Afghanistan’s government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the air strikes targeted Kandahar, Paktia and Khost provinces.

Taliban officials denied that their government launched drones against Pakistan on Wednesday.

The air raids on Thursday were carried out amid growing tensions between the former allies over attacks by armed groups in Pakistan, which triggered their worst fighting in years in February.

Islamabad accuses Kabul of harbouring fighters who stage cross-border attacks, but Afghanistan’s government denies harbouring anti-Pakistani armed groups and says the attacks are Pakistan’s internal problem.

The escalation threatens mediation efforts by China, Turkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to broker a lasting peace between the two neighbours. %!s()

For months, I'd made every decision myself: when to wake up, where to eat, and how to spend the day. I could change plans on a whim. Suddenly, every choice involved another person.

After months of solo travel, apparently, I'd become terrible at compromising.

Just a few months earlier, I'd been laid off from a job that hadn't made me happy for some time. I'd wanted to quit after a year and spend months traveling around Asia; losing my job simply sped up that plan.

Within four months, I sold my furniture, found someone to take over my lease, and boarded a one-way flight to South Korea in April 2024, unsure when I would return home.

I'd traveled alone before, but never for this long. I'd never felt I had to wait for someone else to see the places on my bucket list. And, for the first time, I wasn't squeezing travel into PTO or college breaks, or planning a short trip around friends' schedules. I had months ahead of me — and no one else's timetable to consider.

At first, I was nervous about traveling alone

I could wake up without a packed itinerary, stay longer when I loved a place, or rearrange my plans without consulting anyone. If I wanted pad see ew from the same Bangkok restaurant every day, I could. If I wanted to spend hours at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I didn't have to worry about someone else being ready to leave. And when I met a great group of people at a hostel in Ninh Binh, I simply changed my schedule.

I didn't realize how normal that freedom had become until I met my friend to travel in Japan.

We had a great trip, but our travel styles didn't always align. I preferred social hostels; she was more comfortable in hotels. I could have happily eaten wagyu every night, while she — reasonably — suggested breaks from that much meat. She was right. It was just so delicious.

These compromises weren't necessarily earth-shattering, but after two months of making every decision entirely on my own, I was surprised by how much of an adjustment it was to factor someone else into my plans again.

A pattern emerged

Despite being an anxious person, I often found solo travel less stressful. When I was alone, I could prioritize what I wanted to do without wondering whether someone else was having a good time. Traveling with other people, I tended to overthink their experience as much as my own.

I was constantly asking myself: Are they only doing this because I wanted to? What if they're annoyed that I want to go back to the hotel and rest? Am I being good company?

Those questions disappeared when I was by myself. If I was tired, I could return to my hostel for a quick nap. If I wasn't enjoying an activity I'd signed up for, I could leave. When the decisions affected only me, the stakes felt much smaller.

Solo travel has become more than evading compromise

Years of solo travel have taught me to trust my abilities and instincts. It has taught me to act quickly and deal with problems as they arise.

When I forgot my International Driving Permit and couldn't rent a car in Italy, I came up with a Plan B and was on a train an hour later. Years earlier, a disruption like that would have sent me into full panic mode.

Solo travel has also made me more decisive and more comfortable with my own company. Because I live with anxiety, I'm prone to overthinking and second-guessing myself. But when I'm the one calling all the shots, agonizing over every option starts to feel like a waste of time.

Before I spent eight months traveling through Asia, being alone often meant letting my thoughts spiral. Along the way, solitude stopped feeling like a void that needed to be filled. Eating alone, wandering a city for hours, or spending an evening by myself became things I genuinely enjoyed.

I still love traveling with others

None of this means I don't look forward to trips with people I love. There's something special about reminiscing with someone years later about a place you experienced together.

For someone with anxiety, traveling alone might seem like the most stressful option — but after years of independent travel, I beg to differ.

Learning to trust myself and enjoy my own company has given me unexpected confidence I never thought I could gain from traveling alone. Sometimes, only having myself to consider is exactly what takes the pressure off.

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• Travel
• Anxiety