The "Fallout" series recently celebrated its 25th birthday. That means that in another 10 years, it will be old enough to run for the presidency of the radioactive United States. The original 2D isometric turn-based RPG developed by Black Isle Studios and Interplay Productions was released in 1997, followed the next year by Fallout 2. [This time, Bethesda Game Studios, which bought the "Fallout" license from the bankrupt Interplay, changed the game into a real-time, open-world first-person and third-person shooter. The rest is Fallout history.

In a video released by Bethesda this week (posted below), members of the Fallout 3 team, including Todd Howard, game director for Fallout 3, share their memories of taking over development of the series. It turns out that Howard received the shocking news that Bethesda had licensed "Fallout" by jotting it down on a Post-It, much like I tell myself to take my vitamins.

"I remember this," Howard says in the video. "When I got back to my desk, Todd Vaughn, Bethesda's vice president of development, left a yellow sticky note on my keyboard. That was it. I will never forget it."

Howard's response was less restrained. 'I think I screamed and ran all over the studio,' he said. Because everyone on the team had heard about this possibility." [Fallout 3 was first shown at E3 in Santa Monica in 2008. Pete Hines, senior vice president of global marketing and communications, said it was important to Howard that Tim Cain, producer of the original Fallout, approve of the new direction Bethesda was taking with Fallout 3.

Cain, however, had his reservations. 'I felt like my child had been adopted by another family,' he said. 'It wasn't so much that I hated that family. It was just that my baby was going to be raised differently than I was going to raise this child."

Hines sweated at Cain's reaction, but need not have worried. 'I was mesmerized. I was immersed," Cain said of his first first first-person view of Fallout.

"It was especially great when you actually left the Vault and the light came on and you could see Wasteland."

"That was a big turning point in a way," says Hines, "because the whole point of wanting to do Fallout right was to go back to the people who came up with this stuff and say, 'Hey, we're doing this.'"