After 20 years of patience and negotiations, RPG veteran Brian Fargo managed to buy back a lost haul of memorabilia from Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and more: 'It was like a very exciting version of Storage Wars'

Christmas came early this year for Interplay co-founder and inXile Entertainment studio head Brian Fargo. In a series of tweets last month on X, «The Everything App,» Fargo showed off industry sales awards and other Interplay goodies he had recently re-acquired. Over email, Fargo explained to me how they had left his possession in the first place, and the long march to get them back.

First though: The trove itself. Most of the items Fargo showed off were sales awards for various Interplay games from the Software Publishers Association (now the Software and Information Industry Association) of "Don't Copy that Floppy" fame. The OG Baldur's Gate plaque, meanwhile, came from the Consumer Products Council, a decidedly less musical industry body.

As Fargo pointed out on Twitter, those sales numbers definitely seem quaint in comparison to modern blowouts like Black Myth: Wukong's staggering 10 million units in one week: «Back in the day, you'd get an award for selling 50 or 100,000 units,» Fargo wrote. «Now it's the end of your career.»

There are two outliers in the pictures Fargo shared: A Fallout 3 poster from after Bethesda took over the series, and a mammoth, six foot-tall poster of Baldur's Gate 1 baddie Sarevok⁠—he should also look familiar to any new school kiddies who only checked out the third game. That Sarevok is definitely the piece of the collection that earned my gaming tchotchke envy, but I am once again reminded that a large part of Baldur's Gate 1's plot revolves around the people of the titular city wanting this clearly evil spiky armor guy to be mayor. Democracy has its flaws.

«When I left Interplay [in 2002] I was not able to take many things with me, they were the property of the company,» Fargo told me over email. «That's just how it works sometimes but obviously I had an emotional attachment to the memorabilia and knew that the current owner did not.

»It's never easy when such a corporate split happens, so I knew I'd have to wait a decade-plus for