If you remember, there was a story that broke last year concerning inXile’s trademarking of the Van Buren name. Naturally, that caused a stir, considering it was the internal codename for Fallout 3 at Interplay and was the title given to the game that Black Isle had been working on prior to Interplay dissolving. There were some lofty design goals being laid out for the game, the most ambitious of which was the player encountering other players whom they would compete against as rivals.

Well, a small tidbit of news comes out of a Eurogamer article where inXile’s Brian Fargo talks about Van Buren and the plans they have in store for the recently acquired IP.

I spoke to Fargo recently, however, and he had more to say – implying he intends to make something Van Buren with Chris Avellone, if and when inXile has time. (Avellone retains close ties to inXile, having been involved in Wasteland 2 and, now, Torment: Tides of Numenera.)

I asked if Fargo was doing anything with the Van Buren trademark. “Not yet,” he replied. “But there were some things, some ideas, that Chris Avellone had for doing something that made the post-apoc – a twist on the whole what-was-being-done that we really loved. So we talked about it and we thought why not grab the rights so we can entertain this one of these days.

“But nothing now,” he stressed. “We have enough on our plate to be doing that right this second.”

[Avellone clarified, in a tweet sent after this story first appeared, that Brian Fargo had already secured the Van Buren trademark before he and Fargo talked. “But we chatted about Van Buren (VB first iteration), yes!” he said.]

With Numenera and Bard’s Tale IV already in production as well as a cross-platform (and re-tooled) edition of Wasteland 2, it’s no wonder they have no concrete plans to develop Van Buren. Still, it’s reassuring that both he and Avellone are planning to use the IP for the future, rather than just having bought it to protect the name.