Bethesda and handhelds share a rocky relationship. Remember when they announced Oblivion would be coming to the PSP? Yeah, that sort of never happened. Now it turns out, as revealed in an interview with Bethesda’s Todd Howard, a lot of different versions of Fallout 3 for the iPhone have been worked on, but none seemed to work out.

The mind behind last year’s hit title said that he did feel it could transfer well to other platforms with use of systems like VATS. “We’ve looked into those things, we just haven’t found the thing that supports the brand well. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does happen one day. The iPhone versions that we’ve designed and said ‘Ehh, we don’t think we’re going to do that right now,’ there are … there are a lot of them.”

Could the game ever hit the portable scene? Don’t worry if it doesn’t happen, there’s still plenty more to come from Fallout 3 with two new expansions and a game of the year edition due out before the end of the year. And then there’s Fallout New Vegas.