In a recent video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG developer Tim Cain shared his memories of the 1983 videogame industry crash. In particular, he emphasized that, although bad⁠—like, really bad⁠—he doesn't believe the current employment and studio closure crisis matches the impact of the infamous '80s collapse.

Cain got his caveats out of the way early, though: He cited a figure of 10% of game developers being affected by the current crisis, a tragedy for the medium in no uncertain terms. "It is bad," Cain declared. "It's bad. Quote me: 'It's bad.'" With that out of the way, Cain still asserted that "it's nothing like the 1983 crash."

"To me, the 1983 crash is still the biggest [games] industry crash that I've ever seen, ever experienced, and I think ever was," said Cain. "I don't think there's ever been a worse time in the games industry, especially in the United States⁠—it was very centered in the US."

Consoles and console games were tarnished in consumers' eyes, and Cain recalled that this was the first time he and many other gamers switched to the home computers of the time, such as the Atari 800, Apple II, and the grandaddy IBM PC. Consoles' reputation and sales began to recover in 1985, but the jobs were primarily growing in Japan for years after the crash, thanks to the market dominance of Nintendo.

Cain's first industry job involved games on cable set-top boxes, then PC, and he recalled being relatively insulated from the crash professionally. "My first PC game, Grand Slam Bridge, shipped in 1986, and the company folded soon after that," said Cain. After that, he entered grad school, programmed for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) as a hobby, and didn't work in computer games again until 1991.

"Imagine everyone in the industry in the United States⁠—if you were making an Xbox game or a PlayStation game, or any kind of console game⁠—you were just laid off," Cain said of the '83 crash. "Boom. You don't work anymore. And you're trying to get what few PC game jobs are starting to grow."

By the time the PC market really kicked into high gear in the '90s, according to Cain, a lot of devs who lost jobs in the '83 crash were gone for good. "It was incredibly devastating. We lost an entire generation of game developers. The entire US videogame market collapsed," said Cain. "There were no jobs for console developers of any kind. It was just gone.

"Took about a decade … to even recover those jobs in the PC market, and even longer for the US-based console developer market to recover enough to even say that it was on par with what it was like in 1983."

In one sense, I find Cain's long perspective on the matter comforting: Games still got made, a lot of people still had jobs, and eventually things got bigger and better than they were before the crash. At the same time, I find the parallels to the current state of the industry disquieting:

• An overwhelming amount of games. Some shovelware like the '80s consoles, sure, but not really a quality issue writ large: Even great games struggle to find audiences in the 2020s.
• A general devaluing of games: Subscription services and constant sales leading to the (completely understandable) "I'll wait for it to go on sale" mindset.
• An uneven crisis, largely not felt by consumers. Like how '80s gamers just pivoted to PCs and Japanese games, the industry is global and diversified enough that the end user still gets great games⁠—until their favorite goes offline or ceases content updates.

For a contrasting take to Cain's from industry peers who also witnessed the '83 crash, John and Brenda Romero argued that the current crisis is "definitely crashier" than what they saw back then.

The character system used in Fallout is famously based upon its roleplaying system called SPECIAL. But this wasn't always the case. In fact, for most of the original game's development, Fallout's mechanics were based upon a licensed, table-top roleplaying system called GURPS, which, yes, sounds more like a digestive tract disorder than a TTRPG ruleset.

Anyway, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System was at the heart of Fallout from its conception in 1994 all the way to early 1997, when GURPS' creator Steve Jackson (not that Steve Jackson, this Steve Jackson) objected to Black Isle's use of the system because of Fallout's stupefying levels of violence. Hence, GURPS was usurped by SPECIAL, and history took a different course.

Despite being at the centre of Fallout for three years, little about Fallout's GURPS incarnation has been revealed in the last 30 years. Until now, that is. Fallout creator Tim Cain recently discovered the list of GURPS attributes that underpinned Fallout's initial version, and decided to share it on his YouTube channel.

The reason it's taken this long for GURPS to resurface, Cain explains in the video, is that he believed everything related to what he refers to as 'GURPS Fallout' (that's when you need to go to the hospital) had been lost. Cain says that nine months before Fallout shipped, he had collected everything GURPS related and handed it to Interplay's own archive guy. But this person apparently didn't do a very good job at the whole 'archiving' bit of being an archivist, and it all got lost.

"I had my own archive which on orders I destroyed when I left Interplay, but I assumed they had the old one and they didn't," Cain says. Luckily, Cain's own archive doesn't appear to have been quite as destroyed as he thought. "I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills that had been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout."

The GURPS system was at once simpler and much, much more complicated than Fallout's SPECIAL system. As Cain explains, it only had four base stats—strength, health, IQ and dexterity. But this was tied to a voluminous list of advantages, disadvantages and quirks that stood in place of Fallout's perks. Basically, advantages cost you ability points, while disadvantages would give you ability points in exchange for a debuff. Quirks hovered somewhere in the middle, acting as minor disadvantages designed to give your character extra colour.

I'm not going to repeat the full list here, because it is pretty dang long. But some of them seem hyper-specific. Advantages, for example, included things like acute hearing, peripheral vision, reputational advantages for each of Fallout's main locations, and three types of attractiveness buff, including "handsome" and "very handsome". Disadvantages, meanwhile, included bad breath, habitually picking your nose, a stutter, anosmia, plus reputational disadvantages and three types of ugliness. This includes "hideous—you're the most disgusting thing ever born in the vault."

Most interesting to me, though, are the Quirks. Cain says these were designed to respond to specific circumstances. "There would be one or two places in the game that we would check to see if you had a quirk and then the game would do something slightly different". Some of the quirks are fairly straightforward, like "fear of heights" (though that is pretty funny given Fallout is isometric). Others are weird in a way that fits well with Fallout, like "believes in UFOs", "snores loudly" or my personal favourite, "hates cows". I just love the idea of someone investing that much negative emotion toward a cow, the most anodyne animal on the planet.

Cain doesn't say much about what he thought of the GURPS version, but personally I'm glad we ended up with SPECIAL. While I can imagine the GURPS system producing some fun effectives, it also sounds pretty convoluted, and the original Fallout isn't exactly an easy game to return to anyway.

Fallout co-creator and prolific RPG programmer Tim Cain's YouTube channel is a treasure trove of what-if stories. What if WildStar had shown up to the MMO craze just a few years earlier? What if Interplay made Fallout 3 instead of Bethesda? What if THAC0 wasn't so egregiously confusing that Cain's encyclopedic knowledge of it didn't get him hired at Interplay in the first place? They're all worth the watch if you fancy yourself an RPG gamedev loremaster—but yesterday, Cain talked about one of his wildest what-ifs yet.

In his most recent video, Cain discussed Time Walker—a proposal for a first-person RPG he drafted at Troika with fellow RPG veteran Jason Anderson, who worked with him on games like Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. While the game never came to be, even in the form of a prototype or more elaborate pitch, it sounds ludicrously ambitious even today.

In Time Walker, you'd play a "temporal agent" traveling through time and completing missions to ensure your own reality's existence as enemy agents try to rewrite history. As the timeline becomes less and less stable, your gear becomes "more fantastic and improbable," but mess things up too much and your reality poofs out of existence. Once you guarantee the existence of your reality, you beat the game, but if your reality ever becomes impossible, you "cease to exist." Horrifying!

"Feature bullets, these are great," Cain laughed in the video. "One, visit 15 different time periods. Two, meet interesting historical figures. Three, kill them." Some example missions he mentioned involved assassinating a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, giving a young girl a specific doll on her eighth birthday (presumably as part of some shenanigans involving the butterfly effect), and creating a paradox by preventing the invention of time travel.

The way your timeline's likelihood of existence would balance gameplay was meant to invert the typical progression curve you find in many RPGs—instead of the game getting easier as you level up and snag powerful items, the game would get easier as time unraveled and you got to play with anachronistic technology. Once you restored order and got closer to guaranteeing your own reality's existence, you'd be back to a more standard FPS loadout.

Cain also mentioned the game would have made it to the Xbox, incorporated online multiplayer, and had an open-ended skill tree offering multiple solutions to each mission like the CRPGs he'd worked on before this. I still get surprised by the strange and novel ways in which you can beat Fallout, so thinking about the different routes you'd have to account for by throwing in time travel through 15 different zones makes my head spin.

It's worth noting that Jason Anderson, who concocted this pitch with Cain, is currently working at InXile as principal designer on Clockwork Revolution—a first-person time-traveling RPG where reality morphs in accordance with your meddling. It's hard to say how much of Time Walker ended up in that game since it was only ever just a proposal, but it's a fun parallel.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer Tim Cain outlined how he's seen the internet change games and game development, from the first message boards to the ubiquity of streaming content. As with everything, there are pluses and minuses, but he seemed deeply concerned with the state of commentary about and around games.

Charting overall progress, Cain describes a trend from possibility to restriction for developers, and open to closed-mindedness on the part of gamers. Absent a unified discourse, Cain thinks the 1980s allowed for a much more freeform environment for developers, one without calcified genres and largely free from the burden of consumer expectation.

Cain said that the late '90s was when he first noticed a shift in gaming tastes due to the internet, with the proliferation of message boards and guides supplanting an earlier DIY ethos where the only supplemental reading to be had was a game's manual and maybe a print magazine⁠—like PC Gamer, say. 32 years strong, baby.

The next seismic shift, according to Cain, was the rise of video content and influencers. With the former, Cain notes that the importance of clips and streamability has affected what gets made and how developers think: "What part of our game would make for good clips," as he put it. This has always been a struggle for me as a CRPG fan: Most of them make for sucky videos, thanks to the zoomed-out perspective and walls of text. No part of a CRPG makes for good clips, I'm sorry to say.

Much of the video was devoted to how Cain sees trends in videogame tastemaking. In particular, he argued that parasocial relationships and alignment with preferred influencers have supplanted informed, critical review for most gamers.

"Many gamers don't even look to influencers for reviews, they look to influencers to be told what to think about the games," said Cain. "People don't form opinions from the online video, they're handed an opinion from the online channel they're watching.

"I've seen reviews go from 'this game has less combat and more puzzles and dialogue for you to interact with than this other game,' to, 'This game is stupid and slow -paced and made for casuals, I think you should skip it.' That's a huge difference in how games are presented. They find someone they just like, and then that person's opinion becomes their opinion."

Cain allowed that an alignment of taste is actually a healthy, normal thing to look for in a reviewer: If you know you share preferences with someone, it makes sense to seek out their opinion when you're thinking of buying a game.

But as Cain notes, this balkanization goes beyond preference and fun into that generalized moralizing and hysteria you see around game design, the phenomenon of people having extremely strong opinions about games they will never play. "More people seem to be abdicating their own judgement to that of people they see online," said Cain. "I don't want to think about it, you tell me what I should think about it."

Cain didn't mention this, but I was reminded of how everyone cheers for or against the concurrent player metrics of games they don't play, but either enjoy or despise the vibes of. Cain argued that designers, in turn, can be incentivized to place an undue emphasis on how individual influencers might react to their work. "It's probably not a healthy way of designing a game," said Cain.

As for what's next, Cain said he has "no idea what the 2030s are going to be like." Will it be further entrenchment and siloing, or a conscious consumer reaction against the current moment? I know I'm hoping for the latter, while the former is almost guaranteed to happen.

But I think we can all agree on one thing: If you abdicate your judgement to anyone on the internet, make it the handsome, charming, and informed writers of PC Gamer. Our opinions can be your opinions, as long as you keep clicking on those links.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, who is known for… well, co-creating Fallout, has been a font of videogame wisdom on his own personal YouTube channel for the past three years: That time is fast approaching its end, though, as Cain feels like he's coming to the end of both the stories he wanted to share when he began the endeavour.

"I do seem to be winding down on my list of topics," says Cain in his latest. "I wanted to point out, the channel is probably nearing the point where I see it being done. I think I've explained [to] you the game industry as much as I can, I've told all my stories, the fun ones and the not-so-fun ones, and you've heard it all."

Those stories include how he got hired at Interplay because of his mastery of THAC0, the ill-fated Interplay version of Fallout 3, and the company in-fighting that plagued Wildstar. But he's also shared plenty of his own personal developer wisdom: How to follow the adage 'less is more' and, most importantly, actually changing my opinion on RPG respecs a little.

The thing that raises my eyebrows, though, is the revelation that Tim Cain might be going in for one last hurrah before he retires properly: "I think I am gonna make one more game before I retire again for the second time, but who knows."

As for what that is? Probably not another Fallout game, or any other of Cain's classic RPGs, for that matter. Back in January, Cain described himself as being "over making other people really wealthy with my own creations". He also doesn't seem all that enthused about creating a whole new IP, either.

Chances are he'll keep doing what he's been doing since he came out of semi-retirement, lending a hand at Obsidian. Previously, Cain had been offering more limited aid to games like The Outer Worlds 2.

While I'm a little sad for the list of very good games his aversion to treading old ground crosses off the list—Cain's worked on not just Fallout, but also Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Pillars of Eternity (though if he's still at Obsidian, some Pillars-adjacent thing is still in the running). I'm sure whatever he lends his hand to next is bound to be just as solid.

In regards to his channel? "I think the chance of there being a 4th anniversary video is small." He doesn't write it off as a possibility, but there might be a day in which he passes the torch on to other developers-turned-YouTube sages before this time next year.

It's not overstating things to say Tim Cain is a legend among PC RPG fans. The man's got credits on a roster of games that would make other developers green with envy: Stonekeep, Fallout, Arcanum, ToEE, Pillars of Eternity, and more. And it all began, as he recounted in his most recent video, because he out-nerded the other guy.

Cain played a lot of tabletop RPGs in his early days, which probably comes as no surprise: He developed a love for D&D in his early youth and carried it with him through college and as he pursued a PhD.

"In the evening, I'd often play tabletop RPGs with grad school friends of mine because we didn't have any money, so we couldn't do anything," Cain recounts in his latest video. "So we were kind of stuck in the student housing there. So we played a lot of games, including GURPS, which is where I learned it."

Knowing GURPS "became important later," Cain says in the vid, because GURPS—the Generic Universal Roleplaying System developed by Steve Jackson Games—was originally intended as the underlying ruleset for Fallout, before licensing issues led to the creation of the SPECIAL system. Before all of that, though, a different system proved even more important to Cain's career trajectory.

After deciding to leave grad school, Cain sent his resume to Interplay, apparently because it was close to where he lived. He was eventually hired as a contractor, he says, because "they asked me if I knew THAC0," and boy did he ever.

THAC0 is kind of famous as the best-known of the most-derided old-timey D&D rules. It's the number a character has to roll on a D20 to hit an enemy whose armor class is zero, which is adjusted during combat based on an enemy's actual armor class. Here's a quick breakdown if you're curious, but the short version is that it was a cumbersome system, made even more confusing by the fact that a lower armor class was better, and you'd often have cases where characters would have negative ACs, leading to all kinds of math headaches.

The system was dropped in D&D's third edition, but not before one last, great hurrah in the original Baldur's Gate games—and, as it turns out, helping Tim Cain get a job, opening the door to all that followed.

"They were down to me and another programmer, and we were both about equal in coding skill. But not only could I tell them what THAC0 meant—to hit armor class zero—I then asked them if they wanted the values for THAC0 for each of the four major D&D classes, fighter, magic user, thief, cleric, at level one.

"They said yes. And I told them the numbers, and I was right. And I got the job."

The irony is that soon after getting hired at Interplay, Cain started holding tabletop gaming nights, but instead of D&D it was GURPS that dominated because it enables all kinds of different settings. Cain developed apps to support GURPs gameplay, like a character generator and a star system generator—and when Interplay decided it wanted to do a licensed RPG, GURPs was ultimately chosen.

"I think part of the reason GURPs won is, it wasn't just me pushing forward, it's all those people I played GURPs with at night," Cains says. "And we already had these apps which I pointed out had underlying code that would already jumpstart us into making a GURPs game."

And the rest, and they say, is history.

In a new YouTube video detailing game design pitfalls that regularly derail game development projects, Fallout co-creator and veteran RPG designer Tim Cain said one of the most common issues in game design stems from neglecting an overlooked skill: Knowing when to stop.

"As a very wise designer once told me, 'A game that includes everything is about nothing,'" said Cain, who recently returned from "semi-retirement" to resume full-time work at Obsidian.

Trying to fit too much into one game is what Cain calls a "design pothole": a problem that's easy enough to avoid if experience has taught you to keep an eye out for it, but could metaphorically "wreck your transmission or blow out a tire" if you're going full speed ahead.

As Cain says, overambition is a vice that tempts the full spectrum of design disciplines. It can affect narrative scope, where—to use Cain's example—a game's lore might gradually incorporate aliens, supernatural psionics, magic systems, and gumshoe murder mystery until it's lost its identity and central direction.

"The same thing can happen with mechanics," Cain said, where "you start adding mechanics not because they belong in there, but because someone has told you, 'Well, you got to have crafting, you got to have item degradation, you got to have base building. It's what everybody wants these days.'"

The problem with ballooning lore inclusions and feature creep is, according to Cain, one of focus and clarity of purpose. As he says, "everything should be added for a reason, and that reason isn't 'because I think it's neat.' That isn't a good reason."

The last decade of games is full of examples that lend weight to Cain's theory. Series like Assassin's Creed and God of War found themselves weighed down with crafting systems and Destiny-style incremental loot that felt—at best—like they were peripheral to the fantasy being offered, rather than reinforcing or transforming it.

That same lack of focus has led to other types of design missteps Cain says he's seen in his career, like being presented with game design documents for RPG encounters where designers said they'd lock the player in a room and prevent them from leaving until performing a specific action, or said they'd "make" the player feel something instead of outlining how to evoke a feeling.

While it goes without saying to anyone who's sat through a game's plot bludgeoning them over the head with a pipe labelled "It's time to feel sad," both of Cain's examples demonstrate a misunderstanding of why someone picks up a game in the first place. And that, he says, is because they weren't anchored by clear design pillars that ensured the things they were aiming to implement were in service of the game's direction.

"If at this point you don't know what all of this is in service of, you're going to run into problems," Cain said. "You should know why. Why am I doing all this? Why did I make this setting and tell this story with these mechanics?"

It's not the first time Cain has underlined the importance of keeping a game's scope in check. Last November, he urged today's game devs to learn from games developed during the 1980s, which were forced by technical necessity to limit their mechanical and artistic ambitions—and, in his opinion, were stronger for it.

As the machines their games run on have gotten more capable, and as productions have grown in scale, game developers have been given what's often been a fatal abundance of the proverbial rope. Design pillars, Cain says, help to anchor those ambitions within useful bounds.

"Once you've listed your goals, everything should fall from that," Cain said.

In a new video from The Outer Worlds director and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, he talks us through tone in videogames. Tone is a tough thing to nail down. It's easy to feel, but hard to describe and harder still to execute well. Cain points to The Outer Worlds and its strict adherence to only portraying a particular type of discrimination as an example of why its tone felt off to a lot of players.

"One thing we did have as a rule was, we didn't want discrimination that was racial or gender[-based], like misogyny, or any kind of other discrimination except discrimination based on societal class, and then you could tell all your discrimination stories through that lens," Cain says. In its attempt to make its message and tone clear, it seems The Outer Worlds may have oversimplified to the point of causing confusion.

"That made the tone of the game feel off to many people because they were like, 'I think what they're talking about is a discrimination thing,'" Cain says. "But it was always, 'I don't like you because you're a janitor and not a doctor,' or something along those lines."

It does feel a bit naive to try to explore class in a vacuum, even in a game where you go to space. Being exploited by our capitalist economy sucks for everyone getting thrown into the meat grinder, but women get called dramatic while men get pain killers even though they've all had their limbs chewed up by the machine.

Cain concludes, "it's really hard to define and quantify tone," and different department heads are often at odds with each other, too. Cain says an artist might want a weapon locked to a specific class because it suits the visual identity, but a game designer then has to think about loot tables and if other players will be disappointed they can't use the shiny toy. Someone has to step in and make a decision: preserve the tone, or not?

The Outer Worlds and its sequel are very clearly anticapitalist in their messaging, but as our own Online Editor Fraser Brown writes of The Outer Worlds 2's "toothless satire of capitalism," "Obsidian has absolutely nothing to say about the ideologies that push the game forward, beyond just pointing at them and saying 'Look, isn't this awful?', which, you know, duh."

Tim Cain is back with another YouTube video and that means two things. The first: my career, such as it is, can continue for at least another day. The second: it's time for some delicious original Fallout reflections.

Today's video was a discussion on tone in games, and the responsibility that game directors have to keep their settings coherent. Sometimes, that means shooting down ideas that aren't bad, maybe they're good, but that just don't work with the tone a particular game is going for. By way of example, he offers up the time he shot down the notion of Terminator-esque murderbots in Fallout.

Cain's mentioned this briefly before—notably in an earlier video on Fallout's biggest influences—but he puts it in a bit more context here. "In Fallout… making the original game, somebody wanted a Terminator-style robot. You know, an endoskeleton and chonk chonk chonk. And I'm like: 'That does not belong in here. We're a '50s imagining of the future! Go look at Mr Handy. Mr Handy and Terminator robot do not belong in the same universe! At least, not the tone of our universe.'"

I defy anyone to hear Cain say that and not think immediately of Fallout 4, whose plot revolved around the personhood and potential liberation of an underclass of androids. I like Fallout 4 fine—better than Fallout 3, even—but its main quest always felt out of step with the setting as a whole: more Blade Runner than '50s sci-fi.

So I reckon Cain was bang-on back during FO1's development. Something else he's bang-on about: talking raccoons. "I cut the raccoons, the talking raccoon race, because I didn't feel like it met the game's tone. It wasn't a bad idea, it just didn't meet the game's tone."

I can put the dots together, Tim, don't you worry. Fallout 5 confirmed: this one's about some sort of raccoon slave revolt.

In the mid-1990s Interplay Entertainment acquired the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and would go on to publish Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale. The team working on a little post-apocalyptic RPG that would eventually be called Fallout was largely left to its own devices in the shadow of those projects, which turned out to be for the best.

Why did this group come together in the first place? Because Fallout's co-creator Tim Cain lured them in with a pizza party.

Talking to Game Informer for an oral history of Fallout, Tim Cain related the story. His actual job was to program the installers for games, but he'd made a sprite engine in his spare time. He wasn't allowed to approach people assigned to existing projects with it, however. "So, what I did was I reserved a conference room for 6 p.m.," Cain explained, "which was when everybody was supposed to go home, and then I sent emails saying, 'I'll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine.'

"I really thought that tons of people were going to show up, but I think it was about eight people showed up. And I didn't realize at the time, but I was self-selecting for go-getters, and Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout's art director] was somebody who came."

Since there were so many fantasy RPGs in the works at Interplay and elsewhere at the time, they decided to make a science-fiction game instead. At first, the idea was to make a sequel to Wasteland, which Interplay had developed though it was published by Electronic Arts. Cain downplays the influence Wasteland had on Fallout, however.

"Wasteland," he said, "which Interplay had made before but didn’t own the rights to it, didn't factor huge into that. People talk about how much it's got an influence. Some of the people on the team really liked Wasteland, and everybody looked at it, but we wanted to do our own thing."

Brian Fargo was one of those people who really liked Wasteland, having been director on Wasteland before serving as executive producer on Fallout. "When we kicked off any titles at Interplay," Fargo said, "we would do what's called a vision document, which was, 'Okay, what are the tenets of this product?' I remember there was a lot of back and forth, and you know, what were the aspects of Wasteland? Because it started off as a sequel to Wasteland, and then we ended up having to pivot because EA said, 'No, not going to happen.' We were being hopeful for a while, but ironically, that pivot ended up being wonderful because we ended up with Fallout, which obviously ended up being a good thing."

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain is now out of retirement—sort of. After five years of remote consultancy work for Obsidian and some other unknown companies, Cain is now back in California working full-time for the Outer Worlds studio. In his latest YouTube video, he breaks down how those years went, how he feels about being back in an office compared to working remotely, and shares some insights all freelancers can relate to.

Between June 2020 and December 2025, Cain was in what he called semi-retirement. He was still working on games as a consultant, but as a freelance, remote contractor. After moving to Seattle, he couldn't stay at Obsidian full time as it wasn't prepared to have out-of-state employees.

He says that working on different games and with different teams was "so much fun," but "when you're a contractor you're constantly looking for the next thing." I freelanced for two years, and I never managed to escape that overwhelming feeling that I needed to find more work, so I completely understand why he went back to California and Obsidian.

"I'm not in charge of a project, I'm not a director," Cain says. "You can think of it as more of a consultant. It's like what I was doing in semi-retirement but exclusive, just for Obsidian, and a lot deeper." Now, rather than just working on one part of a game or on one project for a fixed amount of time, he can really get into the weeds with people, and he's much happier working this way.

"Remote work isn't all sunshine and lollipops, and it doesn't work for everybody. It just doesn't," he says when talking about why he's glad to be back in a physical office. "If you think it does and you argue it does, I either think you don't know all the data or you just want to stay remote for your own personal reasons, and you're trying to turn it into a professional reason."

What seems to be the best part of working alongside other developers for Cain is the fruitful conversations he can have. "Just in the last seven weeks, I've had so many interesting conversations with artists, level designers, narrative designers, system mechanics guys, and even one person who primarily does audio stuff," he says. "These conversations would never have happened over a video call. How do I know? Because they never happened over video calls."

It does seem that part of why these conversations never happened over video calls is because he was a contractor, rather than purely because he was remote. He says previously, people worried about how many hours were left on his contract, so they may be put off asking him for help on a problem, but now devs can just message him on Slack, or he can pop into their office.

There are also other perks to being in an office, like bagel day. "Uncle Tim doesn't need to eat a bagel every morning, but dang, Uncle Tim likes a bagel once a week," he says. When you've got someone with as much experience as Cain, he can even help people with their game problems while queuing up for baked goods, so it's easy to see why he prefers in-person work.

"I love this. I love it," Cain says. "It's what fits me well for this stage of my career. And I'd like to think I'm helping out a lot of people in their stages of their careers. That's what unretirement is like for this guy."

In a new video on his YouTube channel, prolific RPG developer Tim Cain broke down what his average daily schedule looked like while working on the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment. Along the way, he reflected on the grueling pace of work he took on, and why it felt more acceptable in 1995.

Cain sets the composite average day in '95, about a year into development. This is distinct from the irregular preproduction work that came before, as well as the even more blistering, seven days a week schedule he kept during the game's final stretch in 1997.

Cain would wake up at 6:00 AM, take care of his cat, then reach the office by 7:00⁠—homemade loaf of bread in hand⁠, recipe helpfully under the video's top comment—to get an early start on coding tasks when there were no meetings to interrupt him. Cain would check in with members of the team at midmorning, excepting the ones who requested to be left alone.

Cain's lunch habits⁠—he would return home to make something each day⁠—touch on an economic reality that makes me wish I was born 20 years earlier. He was living paycheck to paycheck, and so largely avoided eating out… in order to pay off the mortgage he took on a house in Southern California. Not to take anything from Cain's fiscal discipline and hard work, but these days in the games industry, you're probably feeling the same squeeze sans property ownership.

One fun tidbit regarding that house: Fallout assistant producer Fred Hatch rented a room from Cain for much of the game's development. "I need a little extra money … and he needed a place. So it worked out great for both of us."

Cain would stay until 7:00 or 7:30 in the evening after lunch, coding for Fallout if he could, but more often getting called to meetings with other producers or departments at Interplay. He would eventually share much of this burden, including mandatory project reports, with Hatch. "I don't know who read them," said Cain. "I suspect sometimes they weren't read, because sometimes they had questions in them and the questions never got answered. But the reports got written."

"I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark," Cain said of these 12+ hour work days. At night, he would eat, compile detailed notes on Fallout's progress and the day's events⁠—part of how he's able to make such comprehensive videos about this time in his life—then be in bed by 10:00 PM.

At this midpoint of Fallout's development, Cain also revealed that he would typically work eight hours on Saturdays, something he jokingly referred to as "Timmy Time." With minimal-to-no meetings or production demands to eat into his time, Cain would work on programming extra tools or features that his colleagues requested throughout the week: "I'll give you the feature if you give [me] content," he summarized.

Cain rarely found himself alone on Saturdays, with other Fallout devs or employees on other projects also coming into the Interplay offices. In one amusing example of extracurricular labor at the company, Cain recalled that some QA testers were staying late, but not collecting overtime⁠—they just wanted to play more Fallout. Cain took that as a sign they were onto something special, though apparently it gave one Interplay executive some California labor law-related conniptions.

"I know a lot of you are like, 'It's horrible, they're abusing you with crunch.' I wanted to do this," Cain said, arguing that "there's nothing more exciting" than seeing the hard work directly result in improvements to a game. "I hope some of you get to experience, at some point, making something that you love so much, that you devote time to it because you love it, not because you're being made to."

Cain seems to have no illusions about whether this sort of work schedule has a place in modern, industrial-scale development, however. "I'm glad things have changed, that was unsustainable," he said. "But it was also absolutely amazing."

Have you ever sat down and counted how many different types of quests there are in an RPG? We often hear how many total quests are in a game—Skyrim has 273—but how much variety is there really? Fallout co-creator Tim Cain explains the nine core types of missions you can be given, and, to my surprise, kill and murder are two separate categories.

If you just want to know the nine kinds of quest, then here they are: murder, kill, the infamous fetch quest, collect, delivery, the often maligned escort quest, talk, puzzle, and timed. Murder involves dispatching of a "particular person or set of people," whereas a kill quest will involve killing a certain amount of generic enemies, like five alligators, Cain explains.

We all know what a fetch quest is—go here, get this item. A collect quest is different in the same way a kill quest is—gather a set amount of an item, like 20 nirnroot. A delivery quest is what Sam does in Death Stranding—you receive an item and take it to a destination or person. An escort quest is similar, only you need to deliver a person instead of an item, so they're often trickier. All of The Last of Us can be considered one long escort quest.

One that sounds obvious when Cain mentions it but I didn't think of myself is the talk quest. These typically involve you having to convince an NPC of something, like telling V's downstairs neighbour in Cyberpunk 2077 to open up and chat to his buddies on the force. Then there's the puzzle quest, where you've got to turn stone pillars or slot gems into holes or aim mirrors a certain way.

And finally, there are timed quests, which a lot of people absolutely despise. Cain says these are "frequently modifiers on all the existing" quests, where you're given one in-game day to kill those five pesky alligators, but they can be standalone, too, if you just have a specific amount of time to get to a quest receiver.

Cain explains that the more of these quests you have in an RPG, the more player agency there typically is. In the original Fallout, for example, you have to save a woman called Tandi from a band of raiders. You can either kill all the raiders, fight the boss in unarmed combat, buy Tandi, or convince the boss you're the ghost of his father and convince him to release her peacefully. So, a kill, murder, fetch, and talk solution, respectively.

There is a downside to having lots of quest types, though. "If your budget is fixed, which is 99.999999 percent of budgets, more of one thing means less of another," Cain says. "If you want all these quest types in your game and you wanna support them all, with all the additional design, code, and art needs that are gonna come with them, and QA and debugging needs, you're probably gonna have less of something else."

So, next time you wonder why a game has a bunch of bugs, be grateful for all the quest variety. Or, if there are very few types of quest, marvel at how few bugs there are. Hopefully that's the way it goes rather than you getting the worst of both worlds: bugs and a lack of variety.

I don't know when the first argument about a videogame was had, but something tells me it was before the first videogame was finished. Still, things seem to have gotten much worse in recent years, and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain took to his YouTube channel Friday to discuss the issue of "arguing about games" at length.

"People have always had different tastes and they wanted different things," Cain said in the video. "I think each one of you, individually, knows what you want. Where things break down is, you don't seem to realize or recognize that there's a lot of other people out there and they all want different things. And this isn't just gamers, developers do this too."

Cain acknowledged there's no right way to make a game; disagreements over how to properly optimize a game, what features do and don't belong, and so on all come up during the dev cycle and years after a game has released. An example he gives in the video is RPG romance.

Whether you loved or hated how horny Baldur's Gate 3 was, it's clear that romanceable party companions are as popular as they are polarizing—and Cain said he's been pressured to include them even though they aren't to his taste.

He also pointed out bad-faith critique. For instance, no one wants a game to crash, but Cain said some players are quick to lambast the developer and the game's fans when bugs give them trouble: "'Obviously, it was made by a stupid developer who's stupid,'" goes Cain's G-rated impression of an angry internet comment.

Cain blames the modern intensity of online arguments on an industry that's grown quickly, leading to a glut of contradictory tastes, and consequently, games developed in accordance to contradictory feedback. "All the different gamers out there, the huge variety of gamers, they want different things. A lot of the arguing I see online is gamers arguing past each other."

Even worse, consolidation has funneled much of the money and attention into games that need to make a huge return on investment and appeal to as many players as possible. "There's a possibility to make a lot more money," Cain explained. "Used to be, we were excited if a game sold 10,000 units. Then a 100,000, then a million. Now we want 10 million or 100 million.

"This generation of more money has caused a lot of consolidation of the games industry into fewer and fewer companies that can publish. They wanna make more money … that changes the nature of how games are decided to be made."

As a result, publishers are trying to bag increasingly broad audiences full of people that, as Cain said, may have fundamentally different priorities. When they butt heads online, "you should acknowledge [other viewpoints] exist, but you don't because you either don't want to or it would wreck your argument."

Cain said this anger goes every which way, including at developers like him. "Not all gamers," he qualifies his sentiments in the video. "A lot of gamers though. Or I should say, loud gamers. I don't think I ever go anywhere that has a forum group where developers aren't being called stupid and/or lazy and/or greedy."

The video continues with Cain's ideas about the effects of all this online vitriol. He posits that game developers leave the work as a result, that gamers are pulled more toward the indie game scene and away from anything that reeks of the industry—a decision he thinks is "awesome"—and that the arguing is used to make a quick buck. Considering the way the attention economy has reshaped the internet, it's easy to see what he means.

"People make money off getting eyeballs and clicks, and so people out there have a monetary reason to keep the arguing going," he said in the video.

As for what to do about all this, Cain ends the video with a suggestion that gamers vote with their wallets rather than argue with other players on social media⁠—he didn't mention it, but the sales success of Assassin's Creed: Shadows relative to the right wing social media campaign against it certainly springs to mind here.

While huge triple-A games won't be moved by an isolated customer's decision, Cain reckons it's "the only way forward through this I can see, and I hope you do it."

After heading up development on Fallout 1, project lead Tim Cain split from Interplay to found a new studio, Troika, alongside fellow Fallout devs Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky. In a recent vlog on his YouTube channel, Cain dug into why Troika's output lacked a certain spit shine polish compared to their previous games and later careers.

For the unfamiliar, Troika is a very 'realheads know' sort of studio: Its games presaged the similarly buggy (and occasionally unfinished) early work by Obsidian, which was also founded by ex-Interplay devs. But, also like Obsidian, Troika's games were ambitious, imaginative, and unforgettable. They had strong word-of-mouth reputations on RPG forums, and all three of its games have received essential fan patches and laudatory reappraisals, with the Big Kahuna arguably being the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

"We had a lot of feature ideas, we did not edit ourselves at all, and we were a small team," Cain summarized at the beginning of the video. "Every time Troika went to make a game, whether it was Arcanum, or Temple of Elemental Evil, or Bloodlines, there were just so many things we wanted to do. We had so many ideas.

"We tended to make those features quickly. Even worse, we made the tools to put in the content for those features quickly. So not only the end result, but the tools to make the end result were buggy and flawed. Having so many possible options for gameplay meant unintended interactions."

Troika's first game, Arcanum, has a lot of great examples of the eccentric and ambitious mechanics Troika worked into its games, ripe for those "unintended interactions":

• Kill or steal from anyone or be a complete pacifist.
• Weapon crafting, before it was cool.
• In-game newspapers that update with stories of your exploits.
• A speak with dead spell that works on every NPC, 23 years before Baldur's Gate 3.
• Procedurally generated terrain filling out the entire world map between major settlements⁠—it's kind of deranged, and there's not much reason to go out there, but still.

It mostly worked, and gels even better with Drog Blacktooth's unofficial patch. Despite Troika's small size and limited budget, Cain credited a certain youthful exuberance and naivete for driving its teams to make such complex, challenging games anyway. "We make this content as quickly as possible to try and fit it into the schedule we made," said Cain. "And the schedule was what it was because I wasn't a very good businessman and the budgets weren't very big."

Cain also alluded to a lack of systemization and consistency with how Troika's developers wound up using its already-flawed proprietary tools. He recalled scripters coming up with ad hoc solutions to problems when there were ready-made functions they could have used instead, comparing the situation to someone using a screwdriver to cut lumber into a 2x4 when there's a saw at the bottom of their toolbox they just didn't realize was there.

"Tons of content means tons of bugs," Cain said toward the end of the video. "You'd think we would have learned, but every time we learned the wrong lesson." After the sprawling Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil and Bloodlines had a tighter scope, but both games had their own quirks and ambitions that ballooned out into difficult development cycles.

Temple still boasted the open-ended, player-accommodating design Troika was known for, while also implementing an extremely faithful (and thus complicated) version of D&D's 3.5 Edition ruleset.

Bloodlines, meanwhile, was a full-3D game from a new perspective and on a new engine (Valve's Source) that was being actively built while Troika was attempting to use it, all while being one of the first fully-voiced RPGs⁠—and without having the crutch of Knights of the Old Republic's reused alien language sound files subtitled whatever which way.

While Cain said the games' bugginess "was our fault," and that this video was aiming more to explain the games than excuse them, he did note that RPGs tend to be rough around the edges in general. Cain also believes that it just wouldn't have been in Troika's nature to temper its ambition in the name of polish.

And I'm extremely grateful for that: Many of the videos' commenters seem to agree with me that a flawed but memorable game is preferable to a perfectly executed mediocrity. People are, after all, still coming back to Troika's games over 20 years later (I'm people).

Reality seems to reflect the inverse of that fake Shigeru Miyamoto quote about a bad game being bad forever: Games like Bloodlines or, more recently, Cyberpunk 2077 that have a spark of artistry and excellence can, with enough support or a more charitable assessment, rise above the "buggy game" label. "Or, as people called them, flawed masterpieces," Cain quipped in the video.

Tim Cain, designer and lead programmer on the original Fallout, hears a particular sort of question a lot these days—why not make a new, original RPG? Better yet, why not return to Fallout or make a sequel to one of his other classic games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura or Temple of Elemental Evil? The full answer is complicated, and Cain took to his YouTube channel Friday to clear the air.

Granted, Cain has been prolific since the '90s. While the development studio he co-founded, Troika, stopped making games after Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, Cain went on to work on games like now-defunct MMO Wildstar and multiple Obsidian RPGs, including The Outer Worlds which he co-directed.

However, Cain said in his videos that fans are ever eager to know when he might helm a new RPG in his classic style. "I love making games, so it really confuses people when they're like, 'Why are you not making games, new IPs?'" he said in the video. "Other people have made way more money off of IPs I've created than I've ever made. It's not by a little. It's by a lot … the IPs that I made years ago, people who just work on them in a team make more money than I got to even create the IP."

Cain reckons that, while it might be fun to revisit a game like Arcanum in some form, there's not much in it for him; and even if there were, he doesn't have the rights or resources to produce a new CRPG out of thin air. He explains in the video that he doesn't feel "bitter," just "exasperated with the question": "You have to imagine what it must be like to be asked this question over and over."

In the video, Cain lays things out in metaphor: it's as if he were a painter that, at one point, was just happy to be making art professionally. Soon enough, his paintings are sold for outsized amounts of money of which he sees a pittance. While he'd like to just sell them himself, it's unsustainably expensive to do alone, and with help, "it turns out that the guy who's making the frames is making more money than me. I guess I can't sell paintings."

While he conceded there might be a way to thread the needle financially, he added "I'm not good at that. I'm a good painter." Moreover, he's satisfied with the work he's doing—"fun little doodles," as characterized in the painting metaphor—and has "moved on," reasoning in the video that anyone who wants to play his old CRPGs can do so pretty inexpensively these days.

"If you really care about what I want, I'm still making toys and I love them and they make me happy. I'm over making people really wealthy with my own creations," Cain said in the video. "Could you give me a reason other than a very selfish reason—like you want something new, or those other people want to make more money—that I should just not keep painting whatever I feel like?"

As for what might reignite his interest, he ended the video by saying he'd like to see the industry split the pie up a bit more: "When a painting sells, everybody makes money."

Cain posits the movie industry has done this "for decades," and while there are all sorts of labor rights issues in every corner of the entertainment industry, it's no secret that a huge number of game developers are working thankless jobs for studios that chew them up and spit them out.

And it's not like Cain isn't still working on games either: He recently rejoined Obsidian full-time after working as an external consultant on The Outer Worlds 2. It just sounds like whatever role he occupies now, the legendary developer is not in the driver's seat.

In addition to non-lead design roles on The Outer Worlds 2 and Pillars of Eternity, Cain is credited as a rank and file programmer on a number of Obsidian games, including South Park: The Stick of Truth, Tyranny, and the first Pillars of Eternity game (he pulled double duty there). Cain's statements in the video perhaps point to him returning to that sort of role.

Immersive simulation games⁠—immersive sims for short and "immsims" if you're a true freak⁠—are a lot like sandwiches, soups, or pornography in that it's easier to give an example than a watertight definition. Dishonored, for instance, is definitely an immsim; it simulates a lot of factors that respond to the player, boasts open-ended levels, and encourages all sorts of emergent shenanigans.

But those same things are broadly true of Far Cry Primal, a game that probably isn't an immsim, or at least not acknowledged as one by immsim fans. How can that be? Well, Fallout co-creator Tim Cain took to his YouTube channel Monday to try and get down to brass tacks.

It might seem like an odd subject for Cain to tackle, given that, as he notes in the video, "so many of my hundreds and hundreds … of videos are me talking about roleplaying games because that's pretty much all I've made since 1993."

He has even tried to define "RPG" in the past, which seems even harder than defining immsim because there are a hell of a lot more of them. But Cain said he sees a lot of overlap between the two genres' design goals and wants to hone in on a definition for both anyway.

His definition boils down to three core elements. The first is that the game contains "many basic rules on how the world works." The second is that "those rules interact with each other to create a large number of emergent systems."

Cain quickly defines emergent systems as "features that were not necessarily intended by the original designer, but result from the application of those basic rules." He also shouts out Maxis's Will Wright (The Sims, SimCity) as the "master" of these two rules.

Cain's third rule is that "the player, as well as everything else in the world" must adhere to all the basic rules from his first point. Like any genre, it's an ad hoc spectrum; the more your game embodies those qualities, the immsimmier your game is.

He goes into more detail in the video, but those three points make up his thesis. I'm no expert on the genre, but it seems like a workable definition to me, though it probably includes some games that don't belong there.

One game that came to mind for me was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; it follows all of Cain's rules due to its engineering sandbox, but I think it'd be controversial to call it an immsim.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the thought leaders of PC Gamer: All the way back in 2017, senior editor Wes Fenlon argued that Breath of the Wild was the most PC Nintendo game ever largely on the grounds of its immersive simmitude.

All these genre tags are easy to fight over, but they're useful even with the vagueness involved: as shorthand, and as a starting point for discussion. They're why I can tell you that if you care deeply about this topic and love games like System Shock or Dishonored, you'd probably love Skin Deep, PC Gamer's best immersive sim of 2025.

If you've got good taste (read: the exact same taste as me), Tim Cain bears a lot of responsibility for some of your favourite games ever. His name is on the original Fallouts, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and plenty else besides.

Alas, he's been in a state of kind-of-retirement in recent years, doing bits and pieces of contract work for Obsidian, his former employer, and others, but generally contenting himself with his YouTube channel, where he chats about game design, career anecdotes, and how he's in "semi-retirement" now.

Well, no longer. In his most recent video, Cain announced that he's moved back to California, gone back to full-time work at Obsidian (as an in-office, not remote, worker), gained several new t-shirts and a Moon Man tattoo, and befriended a squirrel in the time since he last updated us on his job situation. Which is quite a lot. I get tired if I have to go to the post office and go to work on the same day.

"I'm back at Obsidian," an energetic Cain told viewers. "I'm their full-time employee, and in-person, not remote. So I'm not a contractor anymore." What's he working on? Well, wouldn't you like to know? Cain's not telling, but I confess I am very eager to find out what has the co-creator of Fallout ready to go fully John Wick and pick up his old trade once again.

He does say "Don't bother guessing. You're not going to guess" what it is. So I think that's any game with Fallout in its title out the window.

Regardless, Cain's been back at his desk for, uh, about a week now, he says, which suggests to my enormous, prodigious brain that we're probably gonna have to wait a while before we learn what he's working on. In the meantime, he says that at least one game—and perhaps more—that he did contract work on will release soonish, so if you're desperate to play something with Tim Cain's name in the credits, you've got that to look forward to.

As for his YouTube channel? That's continuing. In fact, Cain says his colleagues at Obsidian are quite the fans of his YT side-hustle. That sound you hear is videogame newswriters worldwide heaving a heavy sigh of relief.

There's a character in Fallout dating back to the original game called Harold. He's a sorry sight, mutated beyond recognition with a sapling growing out of his exposed cranial innards, but how he got that way isn't clear.

Fans have speculated for years as to whether he's a virus-infected mutant, a radiation-poisoned ghoul, both, or neither, and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has weighed in on the debate with a larger point: any interpretation is right, so long as it's designated as such.

He said as much in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel yesterday—the same channel where he routinely shares insights and commentary from his entire body of gamedev work, including everything from the original Fallout to Wildstar and The Outer Worlds. The new video, titled "Let's Talk About Canon," gets into the weeds as to what counts as canon in a narrative and what doesn't.

To summarize, his argument is thus: canon is "whatever the owner of the IP says it is," an individual's interpretation is personal and freeform and therefore "you can't be wrong," and authorial intent is another matter altogether that usually differs from team member to team member, and may even diverge greatly from canon. Each perspective is in conversation with one another, but the lines are clear to see and significant.

Circling back to Harold, Cain said in his video that "Canon is what it is. If the people who own [Fallout] say Harold's a ghoul, he's a ghoul. I still think he's a weird thing that's neither, but you may think he's a mutant. And we can all be right because that's the difference between canon, intent, and interpretation."

These discussions can get particularly fuzzy when talking about long-running game series, especially complex RPGs like Fallout, because a given game may have been worked on by dozens or hundreds of people. Where a short story may be the product of a single author and an editor or two, a big-budget videogame ultimately reflects the gestalt of countless perspectives, and as Cain points out in his video, plenty of narrative games openly contradict themselves for one reason or another.

Cain isn't convinced community sentiment has or should have much authority in determining a given game's canon. "If you're fond of Googling 'Death of the Author,' you might want to Google 'tyranny of the majority,' because I don't really think you want to have canon defined by the majority."

He adds that any online communities trying to enforce a subjective interpretation as inarguably correct are probably in the minority anyway, and that essay Cain referenced, "Death of the Author," is more about extricating authorial intent from criticism and interpretation than about canon in storytelling. In other words, its conclusions don't disagree with his conclusions as shared in the video, but like a lot of critical ideas, it's often misappropriated in forum thread arguments.

Cain ends his video neatly with a good mindset to equip when dodging the drama in online forums: "When I see people argue what's canon, what I instead see is people discussing their interpretation of the game. And if it's my game, I'm quite content with my intent." While Cain's intent has occasionally been out of step with common interpretations, the beauty of critique is that having your own opinion is free and easy.

Today's games have forgotten the lessons of history, according to veteran RPG developer and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain. In a YouTube video uploaded this week in response to a viewer who asked whether old games could offer any "lost wisdom" for today's game developers and designers, Cain responded with an emphatic "Yes."

Today's games, Cain said, suffer from an identity crisis: "They don't really know what they want to be," he explained. "They try to be everything to everyone: designed by committee, making a publisher happy, trying to guess what the largest demographic wants." Old games, he said, had a stronger focus—because they had no other choice.

When Cain says old games, he means old games. We're not talking about his work on the first Fallout here, which is already more than a quarter of a century old. Instead, Cain said we should hearken back to games from the '80s, when he started working in the games industry as a teen.

Computer hardware in the '80s was, obviously, less capable. And crucially, Cain said, there were no shared hardware and software standards, even as "games were being made for PC, for Apple, for Atari, for Commodore, for a wild assortment of consoles."

Game developers, meanwhile, were less specialized. Programmers were also artists and sound designers, working without documentation to figure out how to get games to run within the hardware constraints of the era.

"These games were really focused, because they had to be," Cain said.

The first lesson the games of today can learn from their early forebears, Cain said, is efficiency. The limited memory and processor capabilities of the '80s left programmers with such tight margins that they had to time the display of individual pixels down to the millisecond, or creatively juggle the values stored at specific memory locations.

"It's not that you want to be efficient, or 'wouldn't it be cool if we were efficient,'" Cain said. "It was 'you write efficient code or your game doesn't work on the Atari console.'"

That efficiency, by necessity, was equally present in the era's gameplay design. Games today have accreted layers of peripheral activities and systems: An action game might have crafting, and puzzles, and companion progression mechanics all pushing and pulling on each other. Designers in the '80s had to be more deliberate.

"You couldn't do all that," Cain said. "You had to pick: What segment of all that gameplay do I want to represent? And then you did that. The idea that you could have a core game loop that was a huge variety of actions just did not exist."

Because they could only be so broad, '80s games naturally emphasized the impact and execution of their narrower focus: If the entirety of Gauntlet is entering a dungeon to fight things for treasure, it had better nail fighting things for their treasure.

As a result, Cain says, '80s games avoided the danger of "becoming indulgent" like modern games have. "They add too many things, thinking more of those things make the game better," Cain said, "when really what they do is dilute the game."

As he often does, Cain illustrated his point with food, comparing '80s game development to a high-end restaurant where a skilled chef can cook delicious food using just a few ingredients of the best quality. The implication is that today's big budget games are something more like a buffet, where the variety of flavors has a higher priority—even if the quality suffers.

"The difficulty is when you start making a game, it's easy to go 'I want to add this, and I like this, and I just played a game that had this so I want to pull it in,'" Cain said, noting that indie games with small teams often benefit from a tighter scope than bigger game productions.

"You need to be simple. You need to stay focused and whatever you do has to be extremely well executed. And then you'll be like that fancy restaurant. You don't got a lot of ingredients in that meal, but that meal was delicious."

Wind blows, birds fly, and Tim Cain YouTubes. The Interplay, Troika, and Obsidian developer (and OG Fallout co-creator) is once again nattering on his YouTube channel (via GamesRadar), and his topic this time is the divide between physical and digital media.

Cain strikes a pretty pro-digital-distribution tone at the video's start. Being able to stick a game on Steam rather than order print runs of discs means devs have more time to work on games (because there's less lead time between finishing development and shipping), it means games are easier to patch, and it means old games—like the many classics Cain worked on—can remain easily accessible in, hopefully, perpetuity.

But where things really heat up is with Cain's thoughts on how digital distribution has impacted game pricing. "Digital is cheaper," says Cain. "It's cheaper for everybody. It's less cost all around. "In theory," he continues, "prices should've dropped, but they didn't."

In Cain's telling of events, rather than spread the wealth out of sheer generosity of spirit, the capitalists just kind of, well, kept it. "You know those cost savings for being digital? Those should have been passed onto consumers… They didn't.

"The argument I hear is, 'Well, costs were rising in development, so they were balanced.' I don't think they were balanced." In other words, the money saved on not having to do physical media any more got pocketed by the corps.

Now, there's a flipside to that. "Digital probably is the reason games have resisted matching inflation. I've said this before: I bought games for $59 in the '90s. That would have been a really expensive game these days. And these were standard games for, like, Super Nintendo."

That is to say, the extra sauce corporate bottom lines got from the recouped money that would have been spent on physical distribution meant they could keep game prices steady without it eating too much into their margins. That's Cain's explanation, anyhow.

"Cost of goods—COG. You hear this a lot as a developer, your publisher [will say] 'Our COG is really high.' Those dropped tremendously with digital, but those savings weren't passed on."

Of course, if Cain's analysis is correct, then it seems we're already past the point where the savings from digital stood any chance of being passed onto consumers. The games industry, with its ever-bigger budgets, is increasingly a series of big bets on projects that publishers hope will pull in megabucks, and more and more games are daring to charge $70 or $80 on release day. Hell, there are even whispers GTA 6 might charge as much as $100 when it releases.

There's a bit of a generational divide in the Fallout fanbase. Those who hopped on board with Fallout 3 tend to rather like Bethesda's take: sure, it's not doing much of enormous narrative ambition, but it's fun to explore the great rambling wastelands the studio gins up for its game. Decrepit grognards (me), meanwhile, get misty-eyed thinking about how awesome Fallout 1's pulpy, morally dubious take on the post-apocalypse was. And we will literally never shut the hell up about New Vegas.

So colour me surprised that when The Vile Eye asked OG Fallout co-creator Tim Cain about things he'd love to see in one of the games (via GamesRadar), Cain's answer was unequivocal: "The one thing I always wished was in a Fallout game was an actual good faction. Like 100% good."

Cain has a pretty clear idea of what "100% good" means, saying that they'd spend their time "growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech and maybe looking for old medicine, and they're really trying to help people." As to why he wants to see this, it's not (just) because he's an old softy, but because he thinks it'd be interesting to see how players approached them.

In particular, Cain wants to explore how a good faction deals "with all the suspicion from all the other factions and from the player." In other words, he kinda wants to see if players end up blasting them just because they think no one can be that nice. "I love the idea of the player suspecting that the faction's up to something or wiping them out because I'm like, 'I bet that hospital was used for experimentation' and it's not."

Which is interesting to me on two levels. Level one is that, well, Fallout already has pretty much exactly this faction: the Followers of the Apocalypse, peacenik anarchists who spend most of their time running free hospitals and colleges, and who tend to get shoved around by the bigger and better-armed factions as a result. I'm kind of curious how Cain's envisioned good guys would differ from them, as "growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech" is pretty much their whole bag.

The other level is that, hmm, Cain's description isn't a million miles off the Brotherhood of Steel as it was portrayed in Fallout 3. Bethesda turned the Capital Wasteland faction of the Brotherhood into, well, pretty much just heavily armed good guys, determined to help the folks of the wastes and to obliterate the Enclave as it stood in the way.

Many if not most old-school Fallout fans kind of hate that depiction of the Brotherhood, so it's amusing and interesting that Cain's idea isn't a million miles off from it. Then again, Cain is describing an entirely new crew, not altering a pre-existing one, which is what Bethesda did with the Brotherhood in FO3.

"Fallout trains you that everything's gray," says Cain. "That the good side has done some bad stuff and the bad side is not quite as bad… I just thought that would be an interesting thing to try to explore. I'm not even sure if it could be explored since a theme of Fallout is 'power corrupts.' So wouldn't whoever is in charge of this faction be a little corrupt? But it would still be interesting to try to do that."

I don't like paid respecs. In fact, I think respecs should be straightforward, unlimited, and free. A bright future for all respecs! Allow me to explore and adore your game's many intricacies without starting multiple playthroughs! Viva la build! Unfortunately, Tim Cain, the OG lead on Fallout and a longtime CRPG (and MMORPG) developer besides, has ruined me.

The weapon? A perfectly reasonable argument from a seasoned developer explaining the pitfalls of free respec systems. Curses. That's per a recent video on his YouTube channel, where he fields questions from budding game developers.

To be clear, Cain doesn't say that respecs are good or bad—ending the video with the assertion that it simply "depends on your design goals." But he does spend a lot more time talking about the negatives than he does the positives, a fact I will concede is probably because critique is more complicated than praise.

Speaking of, he says that "players who like respecs like it because it lets them try a whole bunch of different build configurations." So far, so correct.

He also makes the savvy observation that it's a more user-friendly replacement for the old-school bite of de-levelling—wherein old MMOs and RPGs would level you down as punishment if you died too much. "You'd have to replay the game to regain them, but a side-effect of that is you could rechoose different things … It acted like a very rough proto-respec."

Also, "For some players and designers, respecs are great, because they give the players more choice and therefore, in some points of view, way more agency." Then he rolls up his sleeves and clocks me in the face with facts and logic.

Luckily, he starts with what I find to be the weakest argument, that respecs "lessen the impact of player decisions … knowing that anything you choose to do on your player can be undone at any time basically means that those decisions didn't matter in the slightest."

And sure, this is technically true, but I think that only matters in a game like Disco Elysium—where your build choices actually reflect on the story. When it comes to whether I deal 5% more poison damage to shielded enemies, or 12% more on backstabs, I don't exactly care.

But an over-reliance on respecs can mess up design, too: "for designers I've seen respecs be a bad thing, in the sense that it encourages very 'loose' design.

"I've talked about dead levels, where you go up and there's not much to buy—but who cares, maybe people respec at that level, so there's still choices they can make. I've talked about dead-end builds that can't finish the game. Who cares? You can just respec, and now that same character can finish the game with a new build."

He finishes this rhetorical combo with a wink-wink nudge nudge to World of Warcraft, which saw fire mages told to go sit and spin in Molten Core back in the day—turns out fire elementals are resistant to fire.

"All these things—why worry about them? Why worry about your game design at all, knowing that there's a button the player can press and just respec their character … It turns it into a player problem. When this bad thing happens, I've given you something to do, so it's not bad anymore."

And, like—I mean—ugh. Alright. He's got me. Fine.

I don't think Cain's even really coming after designers, either; most developers want to make the best game they can, but if respecs fit into the game's ecosystem, then by golly are they gonna let certain things slide because the respec system buffers it up. Deadlines are tough and they've got a job to do.

Sometimes it's even a good thing—tinkering with your build to overcome a specific challenge is, like, 99% of the reason Armoured Core 6 is good (the other 1% is my boy Rusty).

"Especailly in online multiplayer games," he continues, "you frequently find people saying 'we need this type of specialised healer', so then you have to respec, not because you want to, but because you find it hard to get into a group."

This is also true, though given how hardcore raiders are sometimes, I know they'd just pressure those same people into rerolling new characters entirely. But, alright Cain, well played. I guess paid respecs can stay. But you're all on thin ice, RPG developers—I'll be waiting, watching. And when you make me pay 300 gold I can just pickpocket off an old skeleton, thus defeating the point in the first place, I will be there to have my revenge.

You may remember the clay heads used in dialog from the original Fallout CRPGs. They've not aged gracefully, what with their stiff animations and pudding-like faces, but you can't tell the full story of how RPG visuals evolved in the late '90s without them. They (and all the sprites in the original Fallout) represent a milestone for the CRPG—and as far as Fallout co-creator Tim Cain knows, their source art assets might just be gone for good.

"Even though it shipped with sprites, it was a sprite-based engine, they were all made in 3D. They were made in Maya or Alias," Cain said in a video on his YouTube channel. "Those source art files were huge … they were backed up to DAT tape, but I don't know what happened to that DAT tape and it doesn't last that long. They last five or ten years before they start having errors. So, I think that source art is all gone."

In the video, Cain goes into his history with game asset preservation as a habitual pack rat just as eager to save his production meeting notes as his old gaming consoles. While he was ordered to destroy his copy of the Fallout source code, which then only was saved because of one programmer's efforts, he's had more luck as he's worked on games his team owned. For everything else, including historic games like Fallout, it's been a mixed bag; that's something he lays at the feet of corporate owners.

"I've lost stuff, and I think I take an active effort to keep a lot of things, so I can see why companies have lost stuff. However, they had the responsibility to do it. That I think is the difference," he explained in the video.

If you're wondering why he didn't just go rogue and save everything anyway, Cain noted ownership disputes are not to be taken lightly: "They told me to destroy it. I did … When you're being threatened with a lawsuit, you delete it all."

More than that, it's rarely as easy as quickly sneaking duplicates onto a personal drive; this was especially true in the 1990s, when art assets and code were usually saved to fragile, impermanent means of storage like discs and tapes. It's even more complicated when you consider physical assets, like the clay heads that were converted into 3D models to be used as sprites for Fallout, and complex design documents.

"The early stuff was lost. Either it was physical and I moved and moved and moved … but the later stuff was digital, so it was large and hard to back up. A lot of the design documents in the later part of my career were done on Confluence, and making a local copy of that? Yeah, you could dump it out, but all the links break, maybe the art doesn't go in, people have embedded videos. It's large and difficult to back up, so it's not [backed up]."

Notably, Cain said he never felt the pressure to save his work at Obsidian Entertainment, as there's a robust practice of archiving assets and code after a game ships. To me, that highlights the main issue here; it takes a village to meaningfully archive all the thousands of building blocks that make up a videogame, but the desire to do it usually lies with programmers, artists, and fans who don't have the necessary rights or the access.

For fans of games like Fallout, it's galling to know that such iconic art assets may be well and truly lost. For games without such huge followings or especially careless IP holders, there's an even bigger threat of ephemerality.

"A few months ago, I did a video on game preservation," Cain said in his video. "A lot of companies have lost things. I kind of sounded mad about it, and in a way I am. If you take the authority to keep these things and tell other people not to, and that they have no right to, then you also have to take the responsibility to keep them. It just kind of makes me mad when repeatedly companies, and especially people high up at companies, take authority but no responsibility."

Have you ever thought to yourself, wow, the original Fallout would be the perfect candidate for a remaster? Well, first, you are 100% correct. And second, OG Fallout lead Tim Cain says the process of doing so—if and when someone decides they're going to do it—is a whole lot more complicated than you might think

Cain, as you may be aware, has made something of a habit of sharing deep-dive retrospectives on his past work, and his videos are generally informative, insightful, and entertaining. For his latest talk, you can add "disappointing" to that list, because while Cain isn't dead-set against the idea of a Fallout remaster, he does have a rather long list of obstacles that such an endeavor would face.

First and foremost, legal issues are a big potential roadblock: Bethesda, which now owns the Fallout property, would have to green-light the whole thing, and music would presumably have to be re-licensed as well—a Fallout remaster without the Inkspots just would not fly, after all.

Even with a thumbs-up from all involved—and as we've learned from from NOLF over the past 25 years, that's no sure thing—Fallout's age is another problem: The game's audio and video libraries are proprietary, and it was compiled using the old Watcom compiler, which is itself aged, buggy, and very limited in capability. (Ironically, Cain said he found his original Watcom CD, but doesn't currently have an optical drive in his PC.) It's also not compatible with newer versions of DirectX, and while I'm not a programmer I would guess that would also prove something of a headache.

But lawyer headaches and technical hurdles can be overcome—what's really interesting is what Cain described as the "subjective" approach to remastering the Fallout experience. Some bugs are obviously problems (and Fallout has its share) but others contribute to the feel of Fallout: Cain said he could easily make companion AI "way better," for instance, but "better is subjective here. This would remove some of the jank, some of the fun jank, that people like. You know, Ian won't shoot his Uzi in burst mode at you. Accidentally."

From there Cain ticks off a list of other things that could be changed, maybe should be changed, but maybe not, too: The ability to finish Fallout without ever finding the water chip that's at the center of the game, for instance, or a bug in the code that prevents critical successes in chess games against ZAX the supercomputer. Both of those are technically bugs, but they're also at this point well-established parts of the Fallout mythos. Should they be corrected in a remaster?

Similar questions hover over more granular aspects of the game, like difficulty, display resolutions, and of course the archaic Fallout UI. "People really hated that long strip inventory we had, and the fact that when you added an item it went to the bottom so you had to scroll all the way down," Cain says.

"A simple fix would be, make [the] latest items added go to the top, be first in the list. How about a whole 'sort-by' option—sort by weight, sort by value, sort by recently added? How about a grid—how about we just make it instead of a strip, we make it a grid? That would be a whole bunch easier. But how much are we now changing the original Fallout? Is this a quality of life thing or are you making a new game?"

It's an interesting topic that goes way beyond just Fallout, and one that Cain has clearly put some thought into—which, to be clear, should not be taken as a suggestion that he's actively digging into a Fallout remaster: "I'm not even sure I want to do this," he states emphatically near the start of his chat, "and as you watch this video you'll figure out why."

But he's also not rejecting the idea out of hand: While he has "absolutely no interest" in trying to untangle the legal part of the equation, Cain said he "would love to dive in and work on some of these technical issues." As for the rest of it, he has some ideas but isn't looking for arguments—although arguments, he acknowledges, are inevitable.

"The bottom line is working on such a remaster should be enjoyable," Cain says to wrap things up. "Discussions about these things should be fun. I do not feel like arguing about them but I do feel like discussing them in detail. I like doing that. Whoever has to remake this game is going to understand that some of those discussions are going to turn to arguments, and some of those subjective decisions do not have a correct answer and people are going to argue about what to do."

Personally, I would love a Fallout remaster, ideally with a light touch—make it run on modern systems, make it look gooFalloutd, and otherwise leave it alone. (Except for the parts that shouldn't be left along, but that, as Cain said, we can argue about later.) There may not be much hope of that happening, but it does seem almost certain at this point that Fallout 3 Remastered is on the way—and hey, I'll take that, too.

The original Fallout's lead developer Tim Cain has been making YouTube videos about his long and eclectic career for a while now, and he keeps dropping fascinating tidbits about the foundations of what is now one of gaming's biggest series. Such as: What the Vaults were actually for, or why specifically the first game is set in 2161.

Last year Cain shared that publisher Interplay had threatened to sue him after he left Black Isle, as a result of which he destroyed a treasure trove of the earliest Fallout material, from notes on concept meetings to various builds. Cain didn't want the hassle of that kind of fight at the time, which is perfectly understandable, but in his latest video he returns to the topic of game preservation, and just how bad a lot of companies are with this stuff.

"There's a lot of organizations out there that demand to be the archive keeper, and then they do a terrible job at it," said Cain (thanks, GR+). "They lose the assets they were in charge of keeping. This has happened multiple times in my career. When I left Fallout, I was told 'you have to destroy everything you have,' and I did. My entire archive. Early design notes, code for different versions, prototypes, all the GURPS code: gone."

Interplay had apparently intended to keep its own archive but, surprise surprise, "they lost it. When they finally, a few years after I left, contacted me and said 'oops, we lost it' I thought they were trapping me into 'we're going to sue you if you say you have it.' Turns out, no, they really lost it."

Cain says that the code for the retail version of the game has been preserved, but very little other archive material from Fallout's creation. In terms of what's been lost, Cain talks about the earlier versions of the game, which used the GURPS tabletop system, the original artwork, and even the clay models used to create the chattering in-game heads.

"Individuals and organizations actively work against preservation," says Cain. "The amount of stuff that's been lost about Fallout and its early development saddens me. I had it. I had that in digital form and was ordered to destroy it."

Great job Interplay. Cain does, at least, think the future for Fallout is incredibly bright, thanks to the company that's now in charge of it.

"Bethesda making that IP popular is a big chunk of why it's going to be remembered in 50 years or even a century from now," ends Cain. "So many other games that came out in the '70s, and '80s and '90s: the code is gone. The art assets are gone. Sure, you can try to crack open the databases and pull out those things, but you're only getting the final stuff. You're not getting the original source code or art. I think it's even happening for the '00s and the '10s and probably now in the '20s. Stuff is being lost."

There are now organisations dedicated to preserving such materials, such as the Video Game History Foundation, which this January announced the launch of a digital library platform. That same organisation commissioned a 2023 study that found around 87% of games ever made are unplayable without resorting to piracy, scavenger hunts, or travelling to an archive. Straight-up game preservation is a slightly different topic to archived development materials, of course, but the industry's never done a terribly good job at either.

In a new vlog on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer and Fallout 1 lead Tim Cain shared one of those great "told you so" anecdotes of gaming history: Interplay's marketing department apparently hounded Cain to rebuild Fallout to be more like Diablo, rather than the turn-based RPG we got.

A viewer asked Cain what he would have done to make Fallout 1 work as more of a real-time, actionized experience, to which Cain replied, "I would not have made Fallout real-time. Not back in '97, not today in 2025."

But Cain revealed he was pressured to do just that, and also shared his "what-if" theorycrafting on what real-time Fallout 1 would have looked like had the pressure campaign actually succeeded, as well as the design choices he would make now, were he forced to revamp Fallout 1 in such a way.

"Interplay marketing approached me in 1996, a year before we came out, and they wanted Fallout to be made real-time because of Diablo," Cain said. "The way I finally got it to stop was just by pointing out how much money I would need, and time, and they finally stopped."

This pressure is really interesting in the context of RPGs at the time: Diablo's explosive success kind of poisoned the well for top-down CRPGs for a while.

Money (or marketing) types in the industry would look at games with a similar art style and perspective to Diablo and say, "Oh, is this like Diablo? It isn't? Well why the hell not?"

It's a similar story to many follow-the-leader design fads in gaming, with recent examples including Destiny-style live service, battle royale, and extraction shooters.

One notable instance of a studio burned by the Diabloification drive was Larian, whose first released game, Divine Divinity, saw its gameplay actionized in the face of publisher pressure.

Diablo itself was famously going to be turn-based before pivoting to real-time and creating the action RPG, but that change came only six months into its development.

The time and expense a Fallout retrofit of this nature would have required at the end of 1996/beginning of '97 when Diablo came out, so far into the development of Fallout 1, surely wouldn't have gone as smoothly. The patent absurdity of the request at such a late stage appears to have ensured its downfall, thankfully.

But Cain indulged us in a bit of theorycrafting, both in terms of what real-time Fallout might have looked like back in '97, as well as how he would (reluctantly) go about it now. Cain's next game, the cultiest of cult hits, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, gives us an idea of how real-time Fallout might have functioned in the late '90s.

Cain and fellow Fallout devs Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left to form their own studio, Troika, and released this phenomenal Steampunk RPG in 2001. Its combat plays almost exactly like 2D Fallout, despite the radical change in setting, but also has a toggleable real-time combat mode.

I love this game almost as much as my cat, but its real-time mode is not a good time, serving best as a sort of JRPG-on-an-emulator fast-forward mode for trash mobs and grinding. Cain saying real-time Fallout 1 would have played like Arcanum feels like a threat.

As an alternative, Cain explained some of the changes he had in mind to make a real-time Fallout 1 retrofit work, knowing what he does now:

• No action points, with Agility and different attacks instead tying into attack speed and MMO-style cooldowns.
• A VATS or bullet time-style system for aiming called shots on enemies' specific limbs.
• Make healing items work over time, instead of instantaneously.
• Rework most, if not all the perks in the game to accommodate the new system, with special attention paid to ones that reference or change action points.

Even with all that proposed bespoke balancing, I don't think we'd wind up with a game that's better than, or even as good as the Fallout 1 we got. That's a point Cain echoes one final time at the end of the video: "I think that's everything I would do to change Fallout to real-time. I would never do it. But if I had to do it, that's what I would do."

In a recent video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG developer and project lead on the original Fallout, Tim Cain, offered a look at his collection of photos from the game's development between 1994 and 1997. The photos are not only a fun time capsule of mid to late '90s game development, but also show off how small the team behind one of the most influential CRPGs ever really was.

Cain has highlighted some of his photo collection in the past, but this video was specifically meant to show off "every photo that I own that shows any team member from the original Fallout between the years of 1994 and 1997," though he also threw in some personal family photos from the period. While talking about a Christmas picture from 1994, Cain mentioned that the Fallout team at the time consisted only of himself, designer/programmer Jason Taylor, and artist-designer Jason Anderson. Artist Leonard Boyarsky, who would go on to co-found Troika Games with Cain and Anderson, was not yet in the picture. In an earlier video about the timeline of Fallout's development, Cain described beginning work on Fallout solo in the middle of 1993, creating the earliest iteration of its iconic 2D isometric engine.

Fallout's first full team photo showed just 9 people, and Cain estimates that it was taken around August 1995, with the team expanding to 11 developers by the middle of 1996. In a final team photo from 1997, the whole crew of 21 developers is present⁠—compare that to the nearly 500 people employed by Larian to make Baldur's Gate 3.

Interspersed throughout, Cain shared some candid photos of work at the old Interplay offices: Some spoofs and goofs, people bugging each other at their work stations, the good stuff. Particularly charming is a shot of Cain wearing a paper Burger King bag as a crown shortly before getting the news that he had somehow borked the latest development build of Fallout.

Cain also shared a previously circulated picture of two of the original "talking head" character sculpts for Fallout⁠—the in-game close-up sprites were created from pictures of physical sculpted models, sort of like stop-motion animation. The photographed sculpts of Larry and Morpheus were apparently displayed in the lobby of Interplay's offices, but it's unclear if any of them still survive today⁠—Interplay founder and former CEO Brian Fargo is still looking to add them to his personal collection, if any are still out there.

Cain's channel has been a real goldmine of RPG history, but he's also produced a lot of advice and process videos for newer developers, as well as some takes on current trends in the industry. Last week, Cain argued that violence will continue being the cornerstone of big RPGs as long as we keep buying them.

After thousands of hours spent in combat with orcs, androids, and enemy militants, I'll admit that it's gotten harder to find novelty in videogame violence. While Steam overflows with trucks, farms, and city builders for when I've grown battle-weary, violence overwhelmingly remains the basic mode of interaction, even in AAA RPGs that tout player freedom. No matter how fantastic a world big-budget RPGs might imagine, they rarely imagine one where it's not just a matter of time before the swords are pulled back out—and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says that's not going to change as long as we all keep buying it.

In a YouTube video that went public on New Year's Day, Cain responded to a viewer who asked whether he thinks we'll ever see AAA RPGs move beyond violence as the default way for players to interact with the world. Cain's answer was simple: Big budget RPGs will center combat as long as combat sells best, and nothing's ever sold as well as combat has.

"Companies make games—and in general, products—that people will buy," Cain said. "That's it. It means games that sell the most, and I'm not even talking about review the best, just sell the most, will dictate future games."

Cain was conscious to limit the scope of his response to AAA RPGs, particularly because the production demands of mainstream game releases have grown exponentially. "If you have a company and it's trying to make money and there's one game type that sells millions of copies and another one that sells 100,000," Cain said, "which one are you going to do if they both take just as much time and money to develop?"

In RPGs, Cain said, action RPGs like Diablo, broadly speaking, tend to outsell CRPGs that might feature more dialogue or pauseable combat, in part because combat is simpler to market. "When you watch a trailer and you see people actually doing things—jumping, climbing, shooting, punching—it looks like, 'Whoa! Look at all the things you can do in that game,'" Cain said.

As a point of comparison, Cain explained that during his time as game director on The Outer Worlds, Obsidian ran into difficulties finding a marketing strategy that would highlight its non-combat elements in preview trailers.

"How do we show that this game has a really good story? How do we show that it has fantastic dialogue? How do you do that in a trailer that may only be 15 or 30 seconds long?" Cain said. "You have to reduce this wonderful narrative that's super creative and nuanced that has a huge arc down to a soundbite."

Cain underlined that he wasn't saying noncombat games don't sell, noting classics like Myst and more recent games like Life is Strange and the explosion of farm sims clearly "sell well enough to keep making them." Action games just tend to sell better.

"If you look at the Steam top 50 or top 100, you see an awful lot of action, violent-oriented games," Cain said. "The companies don't make them because they feel like it. They make them because they sell."

In an earlier section of the video, however, Cain urged viewers not to feel like voting with their wallets is useless.

"There are products and stores and entire companies that I will not buy from. I don't think they care or even notice, but I do," Cain said. "It's just one of those things that you have to draw the line somewhere and everyone draws it in a different spot."

I think we'd all have to draw a pretty thick line to make a noticeable mark on the market share when those multimillion dollar marketing budgets are in play. Cain seems more optimistic, however, that "companies will listen" if enough players decide they'd like a bit less combat, please.

"To not draw a line because you think it won't matter is a way to guarantee it won't matter," Cain said. "It's like when people say, 'I don't vote because my one vote won't matter.' Once enough people think that way, it matters."

Fallout 76 was not the first attempt to splice the retro post-apocalypse with an MMO. Years before, Fallout's original owner, Interplay, had taken a crack at it. This was actually after Bethesda had purchased the rights to the series, but the two companies came to an arrangement: one that would ultimately devolve into a lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement and the cancellation of Fallout Online.

The concept, though, goes much further back. Bethesda acquired Fallout in 2007, but Interplay founder Brian Fargo had been mulling over the idea since the late '90s. He pitched it to Black Isle Studios, but founder Feargus Urquhart, now CEO of Obsidian, rejected the idea. An MMO just didn't seem very Fallout. Tim Cain, Fallout's co-creator, felt the same way.

After the Black Isle rejection, Interplay's online division, Engage, started working on Fallout Online. Cain had left Interplay by this point, but the company still wanted to pick his brain. "I remember several meetings with them," he recalls, "where I basically was like, 'I'm super cautious about this, and for multiple reasons.'" One of those reasons was the fact that that acronym would spell out "fool". But his biggest concern was that a game with lots of players did not fit Fallout's themes.

"I said, 'We've designed a game where you're going out in the Wasteland by yourself … And you want to convert it to a game where you come out of your Vault and there's 1,000 other blue and yellow vault-suited people running around. You realize that's a very, very different setting and game and kind of player? And you want to switch it from story-driven to mission-driven.'"

While Fallout had a party system, there's a big difference between travelling with some characters and existing in a world populated by other players. We're used to the idea of being one hero among many now, but this was when the MMO was a nascent genre.

Cain wanted to make sure Interplay understood the risks. "They were like, 'You're being very negative.' And I used to repeatedly go, 'I'm not saying don't do this. I'm saying you have your work cut out for you, and you're making decisions that are making your work harder. So don't get mad at me."

Interplay suggested making the instances smaller (an idea Bethesda ended up running with for Fallout 76), but Cain countered that the exact number of players wasn't really the issue. "I'm like, 'I'm just telling you, Fallout wasn't designed to have other players. The Vault Dweller felt special, felt like the weight of the future of the Vault depended on them. You just can't throw in a dozen others, 100 others, 1,000 others, and think it'll be fine.' I think Fallout 76 feels very different [from] Fallout 3 or 4, for no other reason than you're playing with 1,000 other people."

Fallout 76 arguably makes more sense with its focus on rebuilding civilisation, though, because as Cain notes, "they laid the groundwork for that in Fallout 4 with the settlement building". It was already heading that way before the survival MMO was even announced.

"I often tell people that once a couple games come out in a series, you can see the direction it's going," says Cain. "So Fallout 3 came out, and then Fallout 4 came out, and now you have an idea of the line it's following, and Fallout 76 is along that line. With Fallout 1 and 2, that was a different vector. We were going in a different direction. I'm not saying it's bad. People immediately want to go, 'Well, that's bad, right?' No, they're both what they are. And a ton of people like it."

Surprisingly, I'm one of those people. I was not convinced when it was announced, and thought it was dire at launch, but Fallout 76 eventually converted me. I still consider Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas not just the greatest games in the series, but two of the best RPGs ever made, and Bethesda's direction isn't quite as interesting, but I have had a lot of fun rebuilding Appalachia. It might not be one of my favourite Fallout games, but it's absolutely one of my favourite multiplayer survival romps.

What I'd really love, though, is another singleplayer Fallout that's in line with the original vision laid out by Cain and fellow Fallout creators Chris Taylor and Leonard Boyarsky. A man can dream.

Of all the MMOs that fell by the wayside, pushed into the dirt by the relentless popularity of World of Warcraft, Carbine's WildStar stings the most. A fast-paced sci-fi romp exploding with colour and character, and a setting brimming with potential, its development team boasted not only WoW vets, but legendary RPG designer Tim Cain.

"When I started, I think there were only nine or 10 people working there," Cain says. "Almost all of them had worked on WoW, or some other really good stuff. And it was such an interesting team, because there was so much potential … We had some really, really great people there. And it's hard to make lightning strike twice. It's hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that."

WildStar's development kicked off way back in 2005, but it didn't launch until 2014, after Cain had already left the studio. A mere four years later, it was cancelled. It took more than twice as long to develop. Even though Cain left before the game was finished, it's still the longest he's ever spent working on a game. Double the length of any other project, he says.

"That was kind of the style of the designers, they wanted to test a lot of things. And it seemed like we had an endless runway. But we didn't. What's interesting is, I spent three years as the programming director, and then three years as the design director, and that was six years. And until that time, the longest I had ever spent on a game was three and a half on Fallout."

Of course, MMOs are a more complex prospect than singleplayer RPGs, even considering the rather elaborate ones that Cain often works on. But nine years of development is still an incredibly long time, and comes with some massive risks.

"I remember going to my boss, going, ‘This is not gonna be done for at least another year or two.’ And it wasn't, for three more years," he recalls. "They worked on it for a total of nine years, when WildStar finally came out. And that itself causes problems, because games had shifted. What people wanted had changed. Other competitors had come out and showed what you could do. You can make a target and build towards it, but if you take so long, that target's gonna move."

Cain never ended up playing WildStar, as he was busy working on South Park: The Stick of Truth over at Obsidian when it launched. "I remember hearing WildStar came out, and I heard all these great things about it. Then I started hearing people go, ‘Well, it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this.’ I think part of it was there was so much competition … There was a lot of cannibalism going on."

To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we'd seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.

The competition had also grown steeper. AreaNet had released not just Guild Wars, but also followed it up with Guild Wars 2, there was Funcom's Age of Conan, a trio of MMOs from Cryptic (Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Champions Online), BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony's DC Universe Online, Square Enix's Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online.

In that decade, the heyday of MMOs had come and gone, and players were starting to coalesce around the mainstays. Carbine couldn't have predicted the shape the genre would take, of course, but that's also why incredibly long development periods are such a gargantuan risk. Unless you're able to peer into the future, you're kinda just winging it.

Tim Cain's storied career includes a bunch of what are likely some of your favourite RPGs, including the first two Fallouts and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Some of the games he worked on became huge mainstream successes, while others—particularly the games developed by his RPG studio, Troika—became cult classics. And people are always asking him why he never made follow-ups to the latter.

"People regularly tell me, 'Why don't you make another game like Bloodlines,' or, 'Why don't you make a sequel to Arcanum?'" he says. "They're like, 'You made a cult classic.' And I'm like, 'The problem is the cult part.' They didn't sell well enough for a publisher to go, 'Oh yeah, we definitely gotta jump on a sequel to that.' So it's weird to hear people say to me, in some cases decades later, 'You should have done another one.' It's like, 'You should have bought it.'"

Because of the enduring love for Bloodlines, it's easy to forget what a disaster it was. It ultimately resulted in the death of Troika, which Cain co-founded with Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky in 1998. Of the three games released by Troika between '98 and '05, when it closed its doors, Bloodlines was the least successful. The three founders had no choice but to end the studio, having let go of every employee by December '04. It just wasn't able to secure any deals with publishers.

This was long before the huge indie game development boom and Kickstarter, and Troika's elaborate RPGs needed the funding publishers provided. And it was just a risky proposition. Its games often reviewed well and got a passionate following, but uneven sales and a reputation for releasing games that featured a lack of polish and lots of bugs must have given the major publishers of the time some doubts.

"I hate to put things so mechanically," Cain continues, "but sometimes gamers need to put their money where their mouth is. If they don't like a game, they shouldn't buy it. If they love a game, they should buy it, and then they're going to get more of what they want." He's adamant that he's not blaming gamers, though. "I just think the only way to get more of what you want is to buy the things you want and not buy the things you don't want. Because ultimately, that's all that people are hearing. If a game comes out and sells a million copies, it'll probably get a sequel. If a game comes out and sells 50,000 copies, it's not getting a sequel."

It's a miracle that Bloodlines 2 eventually did turn into a tangible project—albeit over a decade later, and without the involvement of the former Troika team. But publisher Paradox largely seems to be regretting taking the risk. It's seen a slew of delays since it was first given a release window of 2021, is on its second developer, and has pretty much inspired the publisher to never make an RPG ever again.

Publishers love funding sequels, so when a game doesn't get one, there's usually a good reason for it, and normally it's simply because the original wasn't popular enough—even if, as was the case with both Arcanum and Bloodlines, they were brilliant.

The original Fallout's lead developer Tim Cain has been sharing his memories about the early games in the series for a while over on his Youtube channel. Cain's had a long and eclectic career (the only sequel he's ever worked on, funnily enough, is Fallout 2) and also seems to have a razor-sharp memory for details and discussions that happened decades ago. His latest video concerns the specific dating of Fallout, which is set in Southern California in 2161, 84 years after a nuclear war between China and the US devastated the globe.

Cain begins with the quietly stunning revelation that Interplay threatened to sue him after he left the company, as a result of which he destroyed a treasure trove of the earliest Fallout material, from notes on concept meetings to various builds. This certainly tracks with what we already know about Interplay in the early 2000s, which was a legally aggressive and rapacious company (it tried to bully Valve at one point: Valve annihilated them thanks to one hero intern). And clearly Cain just didn't want the hassle of that kind of fight from his old employers.

"I remember taking notes but I have gone through everything, I've even digitised my handwritten notes that I had at home [but] it was probably destroyed because Interplay threatened me with a lawsuit after I left," says Cain. "So I destroyed all the stuff I had at home, I took a CD that had Fallout code, journal code, it had the initial graphics library that I built it all from and it probably had digitised meeting notes on it: That thing is destroyed, it's done."

Thanks for that one, Interplay (Cain does mention he wasn't the only person with access to certain of these documents, so who knows). But the subject today is the setting and specifically the timeline that Black Isle went for, and what that would mean for things that were going to be important for the game.

"I remember one of the first things we talked about was we didn't want anyone in the Vault to really know what was outside," says Cain. "We wanted it to be blank slate tabula rasa, the player and the character don't know what they're getting into. That meant most of the people from the war probably had to be dead. We didn't want anyone who'd been outside the Vault to remember being outside the Vault.

"Putting it 84 years in the future meant if there were any people in the Vault in their late 80s or older who could possibly remember what was outside the Vault, these people were sent out as the sole hope of Vault 13 to find that water chip."

Cain goes on to say that Ghouls and Mutants may be old enough to remember pre-War, but the former go feral while the latter aren't in the best mental state.

"So that's how we first started picking a time range, like 'let's have it so far in the future that most people pre-war are dead'," recalls Cain. "At the same time we didn't want it too far in the future, we still wanted certain items usable, I remember we talked about being able to find canned goods, and even though canned goods only say they're good for 10 or 20 years, they're really good unless they start to expand.

"So if you find a can of beans and it seems like the seal's good and it's not swelling, it's probably good to eat. So we wanted canned goods which would limit us to less than a century for what we could research back then."

I wholly admire Cain's refusal to adhere to shelf dates, but humour aside this shows how deeply the team was thinking about a date rather than just picking a random number from the future. The balance was in setting it far enough out that pre-war items important to the overall design could still, conceivably, exist in this setting.

"We also wanted the player to be able to find guns and ammo," says Cain. "We were conflicted over how long those lasted. Apparently a gun that had been well-maintained and oiled and kept in a case, that might be good for centuries, especially if it didn't get wet. But ammo apparently goes bad quickly. But there was conflicting information we found back in the 90s, some people said it would be good for decades, others said 'no, as soon as gun powder gets a little moisture in it it's no good.'"

Cain says this is why they invented groups like the gun runners, who sell you ammo in the game's hub, and they tie into the theme by "finding old bullet casings and re-filling them with newly made gunpowder, and keeping gunpowder a secret."

Another important element: Things still had to function. Well, some of them. "We also didn't want it so far in the future that batteries and atomic powered generators weren't working anymore," says Cain. "We wanted some places to still have power, we wanted doors to open, force fields to work, things like that, so again we had a limit on how far in the future it could be.

"We wanted structures to be mostly ruins, and of course atomic bombs would take care of that, but we wanted them still standing. So atomic bombs level buildings. Buildings far away from the bomb site would still be there and ruined but would probably quickly fall apart because they were exposed to the elements. But we wanted structures for the player to find which meant not too far in the future."

Cain goes on to talk a little about the locations the team discussed, and how some of them were designed to imply Vaults had opened since the war. "The player Vault, 13, was designed to be a long-term Vault," says Cain, "but not all of them were, and if you've played Fallout 2 you find out that Vault City was created by a Vault that did exactly what it was supposed to: It opened after a certain amount of time, they had a GEK, they put together a city, these were all experiments and that one was to test whether a Vault could be short-term, stable, and reconstruct a civilisation after a war."

Back to Fallout and Cain namechecks Shady Sands as a place built-up by former Vault-dwellers, and a village that didn't exist pre-war. This had an additional layer of narrative importance: Places that had generational memory, and people who had no idea what life in a Vault was like.

"We wanted factions to have time to form, we wanted the player to react to a bunch of factions," explains Cain. "If it was right after the war or so soon that people were still struggling to scrape by there wouldn't be a lot of factions. But if you give it enough time a lot of these factions can form, especially because some of these towns are generational in the sense that a lot of the people you're meeting there grew up in that town, they don't remember coming from a Vault, they don't remember the war, this is the entire life they've had, so you have people forming factions because this is life, this is what it's like, they have no memory of what was."

So the general idea was hitting that sweet spot of being far enough ahead that the pre-war era was not a living memory, but relics of it persisted, and the new world had had enough time for new social structures to form.

"So we had that constraint," ends Cain, "we talked about it for a long time and I remember we talked about 60-70 years and I think we ended up in the 80s just to basically push away anyone who could be alive. Anyone who was alive was not going to be out on an adventure. So that's how we arrived at that.

"We wanted it to be post-apocalypse, but not so far 'post' that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead. And not so soon after that everyone's still just scraping by."

If you like Fallout then Tim Cain's YouTube channel is one of the most interesting resources out there, and will leave you with nothing but respect for the Black Isle team's extraordinary level of thoughtfulness about what it was making. He's a great one for trivia too, like the game being planned to have over 1,000 Vaults, the "true purpose of Vaults", or his involvement in the cancellation of Interplay's Fallout 3 (which he says you wouldn't have liked anyway).

What's Fallout about? War? Nukes? Consumerism? Imperialism? How easy it is to misplace close relatives? All of the above? It's a debate that's raged for decades, and no wonder: Fallout is a pretty rich text as videogame series go, and there's all sorts of messages you can read into the likes of FO1, 2 and New Vegas. 14 years later, you can still click into any forum on the internet and find people arguing about which ending is best for the Mojave in NV (it's Yes Man).

But here's what it's not about, or at least what it's not inherently about: Anti-capitalism. That's according to Tim Cain, one of the series' original co-creators over on his YouTube channel. More specifically, Cain spoke about it in the comments of one of his recent uploads—a video prosaically titled "Capitalism"—in response to a fan asking about Cain's view on Fallout "as a critique on capitalist/corporative greed."

Cain's response was unequivocal: "Critique of capitalism was never the point of Fallout." How can you tell? Because "the game went out of its way to mention that other countries like China were also behaving terribly." Which is very true, of course. In the original isometric Fallouts that Cain worked as a lead on, the US was a horrifying dystopia: A chauvinist, capitalist hellscape that imposed its will on the world and shot anyone who disagreed, but it wasn't unique. Fallout's China—which never dropped the 'smash the old world and forge the new world' ideology of the Mao Zedong Thought era—was also plenty violent. In fact, in Cain's original vision it was China who dropped the bomb first.

"If anything," says Cain, "Fallout is a comment that war is inevitable given basic human nature," and the mode of production doesn't necessarily have all that much to do with it. That doesn't mean Cain disapproves of an anti-capitalist read, mind you: "I don’t think I have any themes that run in common in all my games (maybe mistrust of power)," said Cain, but "people will interpret my games in all kinds of ways. And that’s ok. Everyone brings their own perspective, and a story can mean different things to different people."

Honestly? Pinko that I am, I've always taken an anti-capitalist read on the original Fallout games, but I'm not too surprised that Cain wasn't necessarily trying to make an isometric RPG version of the Grundrisse back in the '90s. When I consider his work like The Outer Worlds—which was intensely satirical of corporate life without really making much criticism of capitalism or private property as a whole—it makes sense that critique of capital just isn't something that interests him that much.

Fair enough, I suppose. Cain's still been responsible for some of my favourite games even if he doesn't share my read of them. Plus, if there's one thing the Marx-adjacent among us don't need help with, it's reading anti-capitalism into literally everything.

In a new vlog on his YouTube channel, veteran programmer and RPG designer Tim Cain revealed some more of the background he and his team initially planned for Fallout's vaults. The crew at Interplay conceived of there being 1,000 Vault Tec vaults in the United States, a figure with some in-game and real-life logistical issues that Cain then explores, all with the caveat that this is him having some fun: "This is just me talking about it⁠—it's not canon!"

First and foremost, the 1,000 number was just an aesthetic choice: "The only reason this pin was even placed in the original game was when Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout 1's lead artist] was doing the vault suit, he asked me how many digits he'd need to keep on the back." Cain said. "I thought, well, let's just say there's a round number, there's a thousand.

"I'm a programmer, I start counting at zero, three digits."

The idea of there being a "Vault Zero" then figured into a Fallout lore tidbit Cain previously shared on his YouTube channel: the vault experiment was in preparation for long haul interstellar travel. I first thought of the LA test vault from Fallout 1 as a Vault Zero candidate, but apparently there's an explicit "Vault Zero" in Fallout Tactics.

Cain also casually dropped that another Fallout lore keystone was borne of stylistic concerns: the thirteen "commonwealths" of Fallout's crueler, more brutal America only came after Fallout's artists designed a thirteen-star American flag for the game. "According to Leonard, [the Fallout art team] just did it because it looked cool."

But even with 1,000 vaults in the US, Vault Tec wouldn't have saved that many people, maybe "a third of 1%" of the US population by Cain's reckoning. "If each of these vaults held something like a thousand people, that's only a million people that are going to be saved in Vault Tec vaults, which is way less than the population we imagined."

Also, while artistic license and fudged scale is definitely at play in these games, a thousand people per vault? I think Vault 101 in Fallout 3 had like, a dozen people in it. They all came to my birthday party.

Regardless, Cain doesn't even think that best case scenario of 1,000 vaults is even likely, looking at the density of vaults in the games. With Fallout 1 and 2 showing us the entirety of California, there should theoretically be at least 20 vaults between the two games. "Fallout 1 and 2 combined only had about four to six vaults in them that were clearly defined," Cain said. "And that's if you count the un-numbered ones, like whatever Harold's vault was."

While the TV show adds four more to Cali, that's still only half of the 20 minimum you'd expect for a high-population state, and the other games don't fare much better in terms of vault density. Cain thinks there's a plausible in-universe explanation, though: "The conclusion here is Vault Tec: They didn't build all 1,000 Vaults, they didn't even come close."

"Vault Tec built fewer than half, probably far fewer than the vaults they were supposed to." Cain said, likening the company to the myriad real life government contractors who bid the lowest and then underperform in our vaunted public-private partnerships, a state of affairs that could only be worse in Fallout's pessimistic alternate universe. "I think there are far, far fewer than a thousand," Cain concluded.

Going off the Fallout Wiki, I count 41 vaults shown across the games and TV show⁠—we recently ranked 26 of them from worst to best⁠—subtracting the two on the wiki's list from Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (I mean, come on), as well as Fallout 3's Museum of Technology display and Mr. House's Securitron Bunker from New Vegas.

A Vault Tec map visible in the show and analyzed by Werthead on Reddit, meanwhile, shows about 120 vaults in the US and Canada, far fewer than Cain's original estimate. So if any of this is binding⁠—and it categorically is not, because it's all fiction⁠—we've still only seen about a third of the vaults in Fallout's setting after 27 years and eight games. I'm still not counting you, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. 

With Fallout back on everyone's minds after the success of the new show, the original game's lead developer Tim Cain has been weighing in on different aspects of the series over on his YouTube channel. While Fallout clearly still means a lot to him, Cain didn't seem keen to return to the series when responding to his viewers' frequent queries.

"There's a lot of different questions being asked there," Cain said. "Would I want to remake Fallout as a 3D game? Are you asking if I would like to make a Fallout offshoot like Fallout: New Vegas is… Do I want to make Fallout 5?" Whatever he thinks of those respective possibilities, Cain was clear that he's not worried about authority, creative freedom, or even pay⁠—within reason, of course. Cain explained that his primary motivator, especially now that he's semi-retired, is his own interest in a project.

"The 'TLDW' is: Every RPG I've ever made offered me something new and different that got me interested in making it," Cain said. "It was the game itself that offered me something interesting that made me go 'Ooh, I want to do that, I've never done that.'"

While there are throughlines between his projects, it's certainly an eclectic spread: Fallout, The Temple of Elemental Evil, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and The Outer Worlds, to name a few. Notably, the only direct sequel that Cain has worked on that left pre-production, Fallout 2, was not a project he'd wanted to pursue, and he left development before it was completed.

"If someone came to me and said, 'You want to make a Fallout game?' My answer is: 'Well, what's new?'" Cain said of the hypothetical. "I didn't even want to make Fallout 2, why would I want to make a new Fallout?"

While money is certainly an object for Cain, he explained that the novelty or excitement of a project is the thing that gets him through the door, Fallout or otherwise: "The very first question out of my mouth is 'What's new about it?'" 

But while it might be hard to impress one of the guys who invented Fallout with a new idea for Fallout, it does sound like Cain's contracting on a few new game projects that excite him⁠—in the past he's mentioned overcoming that aversion to sequels to continue working on The Outer Worlds 2.

The original isometric Fallout games were developed by Black Isle Studios in the 1990s, after which the series went on a longer-than-expected hiatus. Publisher Interplay was not having a good time of it in the early 2000s, and one of the projects causing it trouble was the next mainline Fallout game: codenamed Project Van Buren, but for all intents and purposes, Fallout 3. 

Tim Cain, producer on the original Fallout, has in recent years been posting YouTube videos in which he reminisces about the Black Isle days and some of the defining games he and others worked on. Cain's latest video focuses on Project Van Buren, though he wasn't at Interplay at the time: Cain had left Interplay to co-found Troika Games (best-known for Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines). 

Cain begins by praising a video he recently watched on Project van Buren, before adding that it was missing one detail: his "involvement in its cancellation." Cain kept in touch with old colleagues, and an Interplay VP who he leaves nameless ("We got on well… he had a 10 charisma") asked the designer to take a look at one of their projects… but not in a good way. 

Cain begins by recalling the conversation with the vice president. They said something along the lines of, "Would you mind coming over and playing one of our game prototypes? We're making a Fallout game and I'm going to have to cancel it. I don't think they can get it done... So I'm just gonna cancel it, but if you could come over and look at it and give me an estimate, there's a chance I wouldn't cancel it."

Having a look, recalls Cain, was a matter of going "across the street into Interplay's lobby", feeling that he should help out. This was not least because his Interplay acquaintance knew how to press his buttons: "If you don't do it, bad things will happen to other people."

Cain played a build of Project van Buren for "a while…. probably two hours" that, he says, was more-or-less identical to the tech demo leaked in 2007, and from which most existing footage of the game comes. He talked to some of the developers working on the game, and then the Interplay vice president asked Cain what he thought, and how long it would take to "complete this game and make it shippable."

Cain didn't sugarcoat it. He said 18 months could result in "a really good game shipped". The vice president said that wasn't an option. Cain said, well, a year of "death march" crunch could maybe get it done in 12 months, but he wouldn't recommend that because you'd get something "unbalanced and buggy" and destroy the team.

The state Interplay was in at the time meant "[the vice president] could not afford a development period of more than six months," says Cain. "To me, that timeframe was out of the question... He thought it couldn't be done in six months; I just confirmed that to him."

Cain says there's no single "villain" behind the failure of Project van Buren, even though "some of you may think I'm the villain." He says people who would point at the Interplay vice president and put it on him simply don't have an answer for where he could've gotten the money from: Interplay was coming off years of losses.

Some of the ideas mooted for the game's development (such as using the older engine from the first games) wouldn't have been realistic, says Cain. "There so many "what ifs" in there… first of all, would that engine have been acceptable five years [after Fallout 2]?" asks Cain. "Had anyone really looked at it since Fallout 2 shipped? I started the engine in 1994... it's a nine year-old engine, it's creaky."

As for blaming the team on the game, "none of those people are really to blame. I do not believe that [with] the money they had left, the game in the state it was in, the people who were working on it could have completed it within six months. And [if they did], I don't think it would have been a game you would have liked playing.

"Almost every single question people ask about game development has the same answer: money," says Cain.

Project Van Buren was cancelled, and Interplay would go under in the years that followed (albeit with the name kept alive). Bethesda would acquire the Fallout IP in 2007 and reimagine the series in 3D, to enormous and ongoing success, even if there will always be those who prefer the original incarnation and wonder what Fallout 3 looked like in an alternative universe. But from what Cain's saying… even if the multiverse was real, there aren't many versions of Earth where this game ever got out the door.

"Interplay sort-of died [afterwards], I mean it's still around, but it shut down, it lost its building, the lights were turned off, everyone lost their jobs," ends Cain. "Van Buren was kinda the writing on the wall for that. I wanted to tell that story because it is my last involvement in Interplay Fallout. And I think that's the thing that precipitated Fallout as an IP being auctioned off."

Project Van Buren will always have its place in Fallout history, and there's even an ongoing mod project to resurrect the game. But Cain was in a position to actually know where this game was, and the realistic prospects of it shipping, and his judgement has the ring of truth to it: not least because of what would subsequently happen with Interplay.

Cain himself is now retired which is why he's been talking about, among other things, his departure from Interplay, the real reason for the Vaults, various Bloodlines sequels that never took off, and how his hatred of white chocolate became an Easter egg in the Outer Worlds. Hell, he's even found time to defend the recent Amazon show.

Cain on Games is back with another dive into the lost history of Troika. This time, Tim Cain has been digging through the proposals Troika sent out to various publishers as work on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was winding down, and he's come up with a doozy. 

It turns out that in June, 2004, Cain pitched a third-person action RPG based on Conan the Barbarian. As he explains in the video, the Dungeons & Dragons campaign he ran in high school was set in Conan's Hyborian age because "it was one of the few fantasy series with a map that my friends hadn't read," which meant he had "extensive notes on all the countries, on languages, on cultures, on how magic worked" he'd written up as a 14-year-old. Thank goodness for the obsessive teenage nerd brain.

The proposal features an example of what it would be like to play Conan as he infiltrates a temple of Set to steal the Heart of Ahriman. In the classic Tim Cain-style seen in Fallout and Troika's RPGs there would be multiple ways in, whether by brute force or subterfuge, with one example being the use of a strangulation attack on a lone priest before stealing his robe as a disguise. Inside the temple, Conan would find a fight has broken out between priests and assassins and again would have multiple options for dealing with the situation.

All this would be seen via an over-the-shoulder camera, using the Source Engine as Bloodlines did and promising "realistic facial animations" as well as physics-based attacks. The proposal also highlights the idea that, instead of the standard zero-to-hero format of RPG progression, players would be playing Conan as a badass from the start—earning even more abilities like a "cyclone strike" or more stealth options as they choose.

Of course, Troika's Conan RPG never got any further than this proposal and Cain says, "I have no idea who we sent this to." It was just one of a flood of ideas that included proposals for a Lord of the Rings game, another Fallout, a Might & Magic sequel, and The Temple of Elemental Evil 2. The latter would have followed Troika's adaptation of the classic D&D module with more of the same, working through the "GDQ" series—the Giants campaign, the Drow campaign, and their culmination in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, in which the player-characters travel to the Abyss and fight the spider goddess Lolth. 

Another proposal in the pile was Troika's pitch for Baldur's Gate 3, as Cain has discussed in a previous video. Really, it seems like a bottomless pit of games industry lore over there at Castle Cain, and I hope he continues digging through it.

Original Fallout creator and long time CRPG developer Tim Cain has made a deep dive video about the Fallout TV show, this just one week after he shared his experience at the Hollywood premiere and his disapproval of some of the series' more rude fans. The verdict? Cain still loves the show, and doesn't seem all that bothered by the Fallout timeline inconsistencies some people got worked up over.

More than anything else, Cain praised the series for nailing the feel of Fallout. "It's easy to write post apocalyptic stuff that doesn't fit in the Fallout mold," he observed, and I've definitely seen that play out in the mod scene over the years. Forgetting all the Shadow the Hedgehog/anime stuff on the Nexus, a lot of those mods can feel more Book of Eli than Fallout.

Cain also appreciated how each of the three main characters felt like a different kind of Fallout player: Lucy being a Good Karma diplomat, Maximus a self-interested power armor tank, and the Ghoul a max Small Guns "murderhobo" like I know we all default to on a first playthrough.

Cain seems to have recorded this video before Season 2's confirmation yesterday, but was excited at the prospect of the show's renewal. He also gave his own take on the timeline/lore debate that still seems to rage among fans of the classic games⁠⁠—basically, a timeline glimpsed in the show seems to suggest that a horrible catastrophe befell the New California Republic before the events of Fallout: New Vegas. Senior Bethesda devs have since gone on the record (twice) to assure us that New Vegas actually happened. Well it didn't actually happen—you know what I mean.

Cain took more issue with the show's answer for who shot first in the 2077 nuclear war, seeming to politely disagree with the surprise reveal. Otherwise, though? He didn't seem too bothered by the timeline thing, arguing that it could potentially be a case of unreliable narrators: "Maybe the dates are wrong, either in the games or the show," Cain argued, further noting that "Fallout has a history in a lot of the games of having people tell you something that isn't true."

On the more meta side of the question, Cain said that "lore drift is inevitable in big IPs," comparing Fallout to Star Wars' infamously malleable timeline. Cain also noted the difficulty in choosing a "canon" ending for open-ended games like Fallout: New Vegas, and said that we still don't know which combination of endings to the various games the Fallout TV show has worked into its timeline.

For further viewing, Cain endorsed games writer Alanah Pearce's video about the show's potential lore discrepancies as a review that dovetailed with his own thoughts, but he also finished with a caveat of, "Not that it matters, I'm not in charge of this anymore, and neither are you.

"Basically, anything that Bethesda does from now on, that's canon."

That may be true, but as a lover of crusty-ass old CRPGs where all your attacks miss for the first few hours, Cain's word holds a lot of weight for me, and it likely also does for any of my fellow classic Fallout dead-enders who let valid criticism or analysis verge into something harmful and unhealthy. To them, Cain simply says: "Cut that out, please." 

Career RPG designer and project lead on the original Fallout game, Tim Cain, has released a near-17 minute video on his YouTube channel to talk about the Hollywood premiere of the Fallout TV show. Cain had a lot of praise for the new series, but also expressed frustration with how fans project onto and treat many of the people who have worked on Fallout.

Cain was invited by Bethesda's Todd Howard to the premiere event at the Chinese Theater in LA, and seemed to enjoy the big budget celebration of the Fallout series. As for the show itself, Cain had nothing but praise for the premiere, which consisted of the season's first two episodes. "I was literally at the edge of my seat," he said.

Cain appreciated the performances and storytelling, but singled out how the show nailed the Fallout "vibe" as its biggest achievement. "I was just looking at all the props," he said of one scene. "I realized after a few minutes went by that I had not followed the dialogue at all, because I was so engrossed by it visually."

On a more sour note, Cain took time to address the way fans of the series can behave poorly online, particularly regarding any perceived rivalry between Fallout entries developed by Bethesda (3, 4, and 76), and those from Interplay, Black Isle, and Obsidian (1, 2, and New Vegas). Cain spoke positively of Todd Howard, and said that "Some of the stuff you [series fans] say online is so off." See also: the debate about whether the show somehow overrode or ignored the events of those non-Bethesda games, which has since been denied by a senior developer at the studio.

At the premiere Cain also caught up with Brian Fargo, founder of original Fallout publisher Interplay and currently the head of RPG studio inXile. In the past, Cain criticized Fargo when explaining why he left development on Fallout 2 to found his own studio, but Cain made it clear that their relationship is amicable, and that the development of Fallout 2 was a complicated situation from over 20 years ago: "People remember things differently, things happen differently, things affected people differently."

Unfortunately, Fargo seems to have experienced abuse online from fans reacting poorly to Cain's story, reactions which the developer strongly disavowed. "If we can get along, you guys can get along," Cain insisted.

"You guys can be really destructive," Cain said, "Which is odd, because you do it to people who are trying to make things."

Tim Cain's had a storied career—he's mostly known as the co-creator of the Fallout series, which has grown so big it's getting its own dang TV show—but he's also worked on Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Wildstar, Pillars of Eternity, and The Outer Worlds.

After 30 years of experience he's mostly retired, though he's been spending a lot of time imparting wisdom on his YouTube channel. However—as confirmed by a recent Rock Paper Shotgun interview, Cain is still occupying a consultation role on The Outer Worlds 2. 

Cain explains his retirement as a desire for freedom: "There are games I want to make … I’ve been promised too many times, 'You’ll have final say, we’ll take care of you, this will all be great,' and that didn’t happen. I’m unwilling to believe it for the eighth time."

That's not entirely shocking, considering what he's revealed about the development of Wildstar on his channel—while he maintained that Carbine was "one of the best companies" he'd ever worked at, he also told a story of company in-fighting that culminated in a dramatic meeting where he talked "for four hours" about an art director who had been fighting tooth-and-nail with him. "He didn't do anything different. So I gave up."

Returning to the interview, Cain says that The Outer Worlds 2 is walking in his footsteps: "There’s stuff they're trying to do in the sequel (that of course I can’t talk about) that I get pulled in on because it’s similar to stuff I've done in the past." 

He's filling an advisory and cautionary role, warning Obsidian about the potential stumbles in making an RPG: "Sometimes it’s just me saying, 'I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but here are the pitfalls. Here are some of the huge, huge chasms that lie in your way, that you’re gonna have to wend around.'"

The Outer Worlds itself is a solid RPG, but it still has some problems. That's despite being developed by Obsidian, who made the critically-acclaimed Fallout: New Vegas—a spinoff some players maintain captures the spirit of the first two games better than Bethesda did with Fallout 3 and 4. The Outer Worlds had some technical issues, but it also released next to Disco Elysium, and comparison is the death of joy. In 2019, our online editor Fraser Brown wrote:

"I started playing Disco Elysium before The Outer Worlds and would highly recommend not doing that … The Outer Worlds is a known quantity. If you've played Fallout and watched Firefly, you're going to feel right at home. Everything from the broad structure of the story to character progression is safe. Disco Elysium, meanwhile, turns empathy and substance abuse into attributes and will gladly murder you with a ceiling fan in the first minute."

Still, that's not to say The Outer Worlds failed—it just got plonked next to a game that's still headlining our top 100 list years after the fact. That's like if you ate at a five-star restaurant, and then chowed down on a really decent sandwich hours later.

I still have faith that The Outer Worlds 2 will do a good job. Obsidian seems to be leaning away from the safe doldrums of the first game and into sci-fi goofiness bubbling underneath, if the game's reveal trailer is anything to go by. I still get a good laugh out of "will this creature be in the game? No. Say goodbye to it forever."

Long time RPG developer Tim Cain (Fallout, The Outer Worlds, Troika Games) has revealed another surprising fact about the Fallout series via his excellent YouTube channel. The games are known for their open-ended RPG gameplay and allowing player freedom, but according to Cain, one of their hallmarks, the so-called pacifist run where you don't directly kill enemies, was originally an accident.

Cain, a veteran developer who created or had a hand in some of the best CRPGs ever made, has been putting out near-daily vlogs about his work for over half a year now. Some highlights we've covered include the "true purpose" of Fallout's Vaults, a Troika Games Lord of the Rings demo, and a version of The Temple of Elemental Evil made to test a US Department of Defence AI project.

"It was accidental in Fallout," Cain said of the seminal RPG allowing players to beat the game without killing anyone. "We'd designed the game and done the main quest and all that. And at one point, I believe someone in QA went 'You know you can play without killing anybody.'

"It turned out it was a side effect of most of the dialogue playthroughs not resulting in anyone dying."

When the Fallout team realized this possibility, they continued to support it, and when feasible, Cain's made accommodating pacifist play styles a priority in later games. He expressed an appreciation for how challenging pacifist runs can be, noting that it's a way of roleplaying that engages with a game on a deeper level and requires creativity on the part of the player. Cain seems keen to match that creativity and effort in kind.

On the flip side, Cain also revealed that a borderline omnicidal playtester chafing against unkillable "essential" NPCs is what inspired one of the game's potential endings where your character murders the Vault 13 overseer.

This kind of RPG deep lore just keeps me coming back to Cain's YouTube channel⁠—he makes everything from high level design decisions to programming tricks on classic games entertaining and easy to digest. The developer's already got quite a backlog of vlogs to work through if you're looking for something to watch.

Tim Cain is a storied man. Fallout co-creator, Arcanum maker, owner and proprietor of the best channel on YouTube, Cain's accolades stretch beyond counting, and there are more game design secrets locked up in his head than we'll probably ever know. But hey, we can know some of them, and thanks to Cain's recent appearance on gaming documentary channel TKs-Mantis (via GamesRadar), we know one about Fallout specifically: Who was it that dropped the first bomb?

Chatting off the cuff about the moral ambiguity of Fallout's foundational conflict, Cain happened to mention that "The reason [the United States] got nuked is bio-weapons were illegal, and somehow China found out we were doing FEV." The FEV, if you're not up on your Fallout lore, is the Forced Evolutionary Virus, a pre-war supersoldier serum that was used to make the Super Mutants of Fallout 1. 

But the important thing is Cain referring to it as "the reason [the US] got nuked." Ever since Fallout 1, the question of whether America or China shot first has been a source of fan debate. Turns out it was China. So that's that. 26 years of argument settled because Tim Cain went on a podcast.

Mantis immediately picked up on it. "Earth-shattering, what you just said," chuckled the host, informing a surprised Cain that "people actually debate over who shot first, like a Greedo, Solo thing."

"Oh they do?" asked a sheepish Cain, "Well then I don't know. Who knows? It was probably some rogue nation." A flawless recovery, really.

To be fair, Fallout's lore is entirely in Bethesda's hands these days, and that studio has gone on to do all sorts of weird stuff—from aliens to replicants—during its stewardship of the series. It could well be that the backstory Cain and co settled on back in the '90s is no longer official canon at Bethesda. 

But, well, it probably is: it's been generally accepted among Fallout fans that China is the most likely nation to have shot first in Fallout's eschatological origin story, based on evidence you can uncover across the entire series, Bethesda's games included. Cain's off-the-cuff admittance of that fact is only going to solidify that theory as canon going forward.

Timothy Cain just gave us a porthole view into the development of Wildstar, one of only two games that he quit development on. The video is a 20 minute journey through bizarre office politics, stubborn co-workers, and a meeting where Cain arrived with over four hours of notes to try and set the record straight.

I played Carbine's action MMO in 2014, and was sorry to see it go in 2018—it had fun combat, a zany Ratchet-and-Clank style setting, and some deep problems with its endgame that sank it just four years after its launch. Cain's video, however, tells a deeper story of miscommunication, and a fractured vision that started causing difficulties way back in 2008. 

"Carbine was one of the best companies I ever worked at," Cain begins. "I worked with some of the best people in their fields. Brilliant programmers, brilliant artists, brilliant designers [...] I was working with super talented people, we were working on an original IP, and the pay was phenomenally good."

The troubles began with an unexpected role change from programming to design in 2008. "We had a really fantastic MMO engine, but, it had been three years, there was still no setting, no story, no classes. The head office was really upset." They sent out a new studio head who approved of the engine and art direction, then promptly fired almost the entire design team, including the design director at the time.

No one picked up the empty role, and Cain says he was asked to step up: "Design Directors don't just float around looking for job positions, no-one had heard of Carbine, and [while] NCsoft was popular in Korea, I don't think they'd put out any of their stuff [in the US] yet. [...] After about two months the studio head asked me if I would do it, and he prefaced it by telling me that the studio would be shut down if I said no."

"Then when I accepted [the role], the studio head said 'you have 90 days to create a setting and classes'," which he and his team pulled off. What Cain later describes as a three-way tug of war began, however, when a new art director—who he chooses not to name—came to the company. They allegedly stonewalled Cain, while giving other artists the wrong impression about his attitude. "He did not seem to like me."

Cain outlines a discussion he had with a younger artist, who showed him the concept for the double-jump, a mechanic he loved: "I said 'let's add this to the explorer path.' He was shocked, and he said 'I was told you never took artist ideas'," to which Cain replied that the spellslinger, one of Wildstar's classes, started as the lead concept artist's invention. "I said 'Why are you saying these things, then?' and he [said] 'I heard someone above me say it'." 

According to Cain, things weren't much better with the game's studio head after his initial whirlwind entrance in 2008. "He would say I was in charge, but if I did something he didn't like, he would run a competing strike team with my own designers [...] my strike team won the 'popular vote'," he remarks, adding that while he doesn't like games run by committee, "he still said he was gonna do things the way his strike team did." 

Cain says he kept a detailed digital record during his time at Carbine, a record which he used in a meeting with the art director himself: "I proceeded to talk, without pause, for four hours.[...] I went back to work the next day, and absolutely nothing about the art director changed. He didn't do anything different. So I gave up—I basically said I'm not gonna argue anymore, I'm not going to resist anymore."

What made Cain hand in his resignation, however, was a meeting he had with Fun QA, a quality assurance group under NCSoft based in Seoul. "The Studio Head told us in a director's meeting that he heard about [Fun QA's report], and that we would have to go over it next week [...] and that it was one hundred percent design complaints."

"So what arrived was 56 pages of design review—mostly positive! [...] That was followed by a separate [document of] 79 pages. Nothing but art complaints," this became the straw that broke the camel's back for Cain. "After the meeting, I went to the studio head, went to his office, shut the door, and said 'you lied to me, here's my resignation'." He then reports that within 24-48 hours, "before me and after me", an audio director, senior programmer, and lead concept artist all also quit. 

The video paints a messy picture of life at Carbine during Wildstar's development, one rife with in-fighting and a lack of communication, one made all the more bitter for Cain's positive words for his co-workers. It's a pretty solid encapsulation of Wildstar as a whole: it was an MMO that showed so much promise at its release, but failed to keep its vision intact as it pulled in all sorts of directions. To hear that same story allegedly reflected the company culture during its development is a reminder of a Wildstar that could have been.

Update 5/27/23: Tim Cain has followed up his prior two videos with a third further elaborating on his experience, asking viewers to approach his stories "with nuance," and stating that "things aren't as black and white in these stories as you make them out to be.

"These are real people trying to make decisions in the moment, sometimes they make good ones, sometimes they make bad ones."

Cain stresses that he does not want viewers to demonize Interplay founder Brian Fargo on the basis of his recollections. "Yes, I think Brian Fargo acted badly sometimes, but he also acted really nicely sometimes." Cain points to Fargo's love and support of the original Fallout toward the end of its development cycle, and even reveals that the CEO never requested the "Brian Fargo presents" credit at the beginning of Fallout 1—Cain states that one of his collaborators, Leonard Boyarsky or Jason Anderson, came up with the idea as a way of thanking Fargo for his investment in the project.

Cain further points to his own failings as a business owner and project lead at Troika in comparison to Fargo, arguing that he does hold responsibility for members of that team losing their livelihoods when Troika shut down in 2005.

"There's a lot of nuance going on here.. I think it's ironic that a colorblind person is telling you 'you can't look at this so black and white.'

"Don't be 100% sure that you have the entire story, and also don't base the entire opinion you have on the people in these stories, on these stories."

Original Story: Veteran RPG creator Tim Cain has continued his campaign to pull back the curtain on CRPG history through a series of quite lovely and informative blogs on YouTube. Yesterday, he hit us with the surprising reveal that the original Fallout, which Cain co-created, was a low priority "B-tier" project for publisher Interplay during much of its development, and that video serves as background for today's topic: why Cain and fellow developers Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left the development of Fallout 2 before its release.

To recap, Tim Cain is a veteran RPG developer, having worked at Interplay, Troika, and Obsidian on games like Fallout, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity, and the more recent Outer Worlds. From a state of semi-retirement, he's been vlogging about various untold stories from his career like the original lore purpose of Fallout's vaults or an AI-focused retrofit of his underappreciated D&D game, The Temple of Elemental Evil, for use by the United States Department of Defense.

The departure of Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson from Interplay to form their own RPG studio is one of those mythical bits of RPG lore at this point, a historical hinge point mused on by weirdos like me. In a lot of ways, Troika's first game Arcanum feels like an alternate Fallout 2, a divergent evolutionary path for a lot of the same ideas.

According to Cain, Fallout 1 being a low priority for Interplay initially was a blessing in disguise for him and the team—it led to a lack of oversight and an amount of creative freedom the developers would come to long for later. Cain describes taking on a lot of first-time developers, as well as so-called "problem employees" that hadn't thrived at Interplay.

Things began to change toward the end of development as Interplay's QA employees began playing Fallout to the exclusion of their other assignments, which landed Cain in a spot of trouble, and the project came to the attention of Interplay founder (now inXile CEO) Brian Fargo. As Cain describes it, Fallout built greater momentum and drew more attention in the months leading to its release, and after its critical success, Fallout 2 became a priority for Interplay.

But Cain describes not wanting to make a sequel at the time, feeling burnt out after a long crunch on Fallout 1 and wanting to move on to something different. Cain's pick to head up Fallout 2, the first game's assistant producer, Fred Hatch, was not promoted to the role—Interplay management told Hatch it never received Cain's written recommendation on the matter, while Cain asserts it was delivered and either missed or ignored. When the team initially put on Fallout 2 began to flounder, Cain says Fargo requested a new pitch from him, Boyarsky, and Anderson, one that would form the basis of the Fallout 2 that was eventually released.

Cain characterizes the project as having increased interference from management, citing Fallout 2's infamous tutorial, The Temple of Trials, as an example. "We were mandated to put that in," Cain explained in the video. "We were told there had to be a tutorial. I said, 'Can people skip it?' 'No.' 'What about on subsequent playthroughs?' 'No.'"

While Fallout 1's iconic box art was created in-house by Boyarsky and an assistant, Cain says the team were forbidden from repeating this by a representative of the marketing department, with a frustrating meeting presenting the decision as a done deal without any input from Cain. When Cain complained of other departments interfering with the development team's vision and process, CEO Fargo offered to fire the offending employee to Cain's consternation, wanting creative latitude but not for anyone to lose their job over it. "I just want[ed] it to go back to what Fallout [1] was like."

The developer characterized the newfound attention and interference as especially galling given how little faith the company had seemed to have in his team on the original project. He sums up the response as, "People I had never talked to before in my life were coming up and saying, 'That was a great job we did on Fallout.'"

With Interplay wanting an October 1998 release for Fallout 2 (something the remaining team ultimately did accomplish), its developers were staring down another long crunch period to deliver it, but Cain says the final straw related to Fallout 1, and the bonus payouts for employees who worked on it. 

Cain states that his bonus for shipping the original Fallout was significantly docked, and at the personal discretion of CEO Brian Fargo. According to Cain,  Fargo reappropriated a portion of his bonus for an employee Cain argues had grossly underperformed and whose original bonus reflected that assessment. The bonus was also allegedly further docked over a delay relating to a save-corrupting bug: Cain states that he refused to single out the team member responsible for it even at Fargo's request, with the CEO then assigning responsibility to Cain and cutting his bonus accordingly. We've reached out to Brian Fargo for comment, and will update this story if we hear back.

"I had made an IP from scratch that nobody believed in, except the team," Cain concludes, "And then my reward for that was more crunch, more responsibility that I didn't want, tons of interference from people who had ignored us for the last three years, and a reduced bonus to 'get me motivated.' I was done."

Cain left the company with Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson shortly thereafter, and the trio would found Troika Games, the ill-fated but supremely productive RPG house, before moving on to other areas of the industry. Cain and Boyarsky would reunite for 2019's The Outer Worlds, and Cain continues to contract on games for Obsidian and other developers. On Fallout 2, Cain concluded by saying, "I don't want any of you to change your opinion on Fallout 2 because of this.

"If you like Fallout 2, play it, enjoy it! A really good group of people worked on it. I just couldn't do it. That's sometimes how development goes."

Games industry veteran Tim Cain, the creator of Fallout and co-founder of Troika Games, has a YouTube channel where he reveals never-before-seen RPG history. It's a regular source of fascinating info for those of us who love the games he's worked on, and one of his previous videos discussed Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines' cut multiplayer component. In that video, Cain explained he joined Bloodlines late, as a programmer who was mostly responsible for boss AI. That means we have him to thank and/or blame for the fights against the wereshark hengeyokai and the Sheriff. 

More recently, Cain dug out two design documents for proposed sequels to Bloodlines, both of which would have continued the story of the first game's protagonist and followed directly from where Bloodlines ended—one of the endings where you don't die, that is.

"The two documents I found for sequels are dated around the time I came on in late fall, 2003," Cain says. "I'm pretty sure these were done by request, that Activision said, 'Hey, when you finish, what do you think you'll do afterwards?' Both of the design documents are unfinished."

The first describes a game subtitled Exodus, which would have built on the idea of Gehenna—a vampiric apocalypse scenario brought on by the rise of thin bloods and climaxing in the return of the original vampire, Caine. "In Exodus you are basically escaping from what you just did in Bloodlines in Los Angeles," Cain says, "but you're not the only one who are escaping. Apparently Gehenna is coming and a lot of vampires are trying to get out. You go to Barstow because, yeah, that's where vampires would be least likely to go, and not only are you being pursued, but there are already some vampires in Barstow, so it's a question of whether or not they will help you or hurt you. But Barstow is where the whole game takes place."

The Exodus proposal also mentions a third game with the subtitle Final Nights, which would scale things back up again from the smaller location of Barstow to Las Vegas. It seems like the mention of Final Nights is pretty vague, and all Cain says about it is, "I believe Gehenna is about to happen."

The other proposal calls the sequel Bloodhunt, which did eventually get used as the name for the surprisingly decent battle royale. Troika's Bloodhunt sounds a lot like Exodus, as Cain describes it, dealing with the fallout of Bloodlines' finale and at least beginning in Barstow. "You're trying to get to Las Vegas and you've sent your ghouls ahead of you. They didn't get to Vegas. You make it to a truck stop outside Barstow where you are attacked by a lot of the clans in Vegas, all the ones that you made angry. So that one only had designed the first act, so maybe it would go on to Vegas later."

Though the document contains "some storyline" and suggestions regarding mechanics, it's light on details since it dates from a year before Bloodlines was even released, and the developers "wanted to see what resonated from Bloodlines" before making their minds up about what to focus on. "Both of these are very vague, but I think it's interesting that we made two different proposals and they're both in Barstow, but we had already started thinking about a sequel to the sequel, so we were already thinking of it in terms of a trilogy."

Wonderful as it would be to inhabit an alternate timeline where Troika survived and got to make two more Bloodlines games, and maybe Arcanum 2: Journey to the Centre of Arcanum as well, Cain isn't upset that didn't come to pass. "Too bad it didn't get made," he says, "but I like to think of what Dr. Seuss said, which is 'Don't be sad it's over; be happy it happened.' I'm paraphrasing. And that's my attitude on this." The quote actually comes from a German poet, but the sentiment remains valid. It's best to be sanguine about things like this, especially when vampires are involved.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for more news about the version of Bloodlines 2 that Paradox announced in 2019. Original developer Hardsuit Labs was removed from the project in 2021. While work has continued under another, as-yet-unnamed studio, there's no guarantee whatever eventually releases will resemble Hardsuit's vision, which would have been set in Seattle and feature a new protagonist—though at least one NPC from the original was set to return.

Tim Cain's had a storied career, hasn't he? The man's had a hand in pretty much all of my favourite games: Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity, and Tyranny. Now the legendary game designer has a new hobby: Dropping (in the inimitable words of PCG's Ted Litchfield) "heater after heater" of classic RPG development lore over on his YouTube channel.

One of those heaters is the absolutely irresistible "The true purpose of vaults in Fallout," wherein Cain drops the knowledge that—in his original conception at the end of Fallout 1—the vaults were basically testbeds for a starship.

"If you ever read reports from the '50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange," said Cain, "there basically is no Earth to come back to". That cheery thought gave him an idea, "Maybe that was the whole point: There is no Earth to come back to".

"So the head of the Enclave"—Fallout's quasi-fascist continuity US government after the war, and a secretive deep state apparatus before it—"and probably the very highest levels of the US government were like, 'let's build a starship'".

But because all the other planets in our solar system kind of suck, the starship's voyage would take hundreds if not thousands of years to find somewhere habitable. That meant adapting to the challenges of feeding multiple generations of crew in an enclosed environment, putting people in cryo-storage, and generally making sure your best and brightest didn't die in the vacuum of space. 

And well, by golly, it turned out that Vault-Tec had just the answer for that. "Every vault was in some sense a test," said Cain, even the control vaults like the one that formed the basis of Fallout 2's Vault City. "Vault 13, where the player was originally in Fallout [1], wasn't designed to work. They wanted to see how long these vaults would last and so … generations of overseers in there were told to keep people in".

While we've always known that Fallout's vaults weren't quite the beneficent shelters they were marketed as, and instead served as the basis for a range of ethically dubious scientific experiments, I can't say I've heard this starship lore before. It does make a bit more sense. 

Cain points out that keeping people cooped up underground for decades and centuries just to release them back into a blasted wasteland doesn't really help anyone, but a goal of eventually blowing this joint for interstellar greener pastures? That seems more reasonable. Kinda. After all, it's not too far removed from Mr. House's big scheme—building a rocket and getting out of here with the Wasteland's finest minds—in Fallout: New Vegas.

Cain points out that he has no idea what Bethesda's grand vision for the vaults is, so it may have jettisoned the starship idea entirely (if it was even aware of it). But given that Bethesda already sent us to space once for some reason—in the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fallout 3—it wouldn't exactly be incongruous. 

Fallout and The Outer Worlds co-creator Tim Cain has started a YouTube channel covering stories from throughout his over 30-year career in the games industry. One of the most surprising tidbits he's shared in the week since coming online is that the company he co-founded with fellow ex-Interplay Fallout luminaries, Troika, almost made a Lord of the Rings RPG.

Cain still has footage of the demo he mocked up back in 2000. It's on the Arcanum engine, and even boots up with that game's main menu and shares many of its UI elements. Interestingly, it has this really gorgeous pre-rendered background art like Baldur's Gate instead of the admittedly drab (but still charming) Fallout-style modular tiles of Arcanum. If I didn't know better, I'd have guessed this was a prototype of Troika's later Temple of Elemental Evil (the most D&D of all D&D games).

To hear Cain tell it, Troika was contracted to make the demo by now-defunct publisher Sierra after it acquired the rights to the LotR books (but not the movies! A very familiar-sounding situation). "Sierra liked what they saw," Cain said in the video, "then decided to pull all the development internally. So we didn't get to make the game." Sierra went bust in '02, and the LotR CRPG went the way of the Dodo or the Jess Mariano spinoff of Gilmore Girls.

Cain says the game would have followed a sort of "shadow Fellowship" clearing the way for Frodo and the gang, which to me sounds a lot like EA Redwood's PS2 Lord of the Rings JRPG, The Third Age. Honestly this one doesn't bum me out too much to have lost in this timeline, though it does rule to gawk at a never-before-seen, prototype Troika RPG on Arcanum's engine, or at least it does for a freak like me.

In another video, Cain does get into a game from Earth 2 I really do wish I could have played somehow: Arcanum 2: Journey to the Centre of Arcanum, which never got past the design doc phase. As an aside: you can peep a cheeky PC Gamer Editor's Choice medallion on the Arcanum big box Cain holds up⁠—it's certainly still this PC Gamer editor's choice. Though if Troika had tried making a Source engine, first-person sequel to Arcanum, who knows if they ever would have got around to developing one of my all-time favorite games: Vampire: The Masquerade⁠—Bloodlines.

In yet another video from this past week, Cain reveals that the legendarily fraught development of this first person vampire RPG was almost even more ambitious: Troika proposed a multiplayer mode Cain affectionately refers to as "Counter-Bite," where a team of vampires would square off against a team of Vampire Hunters to try and wake or stake a powerful, sleeping, elder vampire. Activision (perhaps very wisely) judged Troika had too much on its plate already, and outsourced Counter-Bite to another studio before axing VtMB's multiplayer element entirely. All of a sudden, battle royale VtM game Bloodhunt seems so much less of an "out there" idea to me.

It's only been like, a week, and Cain's already blown this RPG fan's mind several times over with these candid looks into his games' development⁠—and I haven't even started the video titled "The True Purpose of Vaults in Fallout." Cain says he's entered a semi-retirement now, still consulting on projects with Obsidian and other developers, and his Cain on Games series is well worth watching⁠—he's gotta do an episode on Troika's Fallout-like post apocalyptic RPG prototype eventually, right?

The Fallout series recently celebrated its 25th birthday, meaning that in another decade it'll be old enough to run for president of the irradiated United States. The original 2D isometric turn-based RPG, developed by Black Isle Studios and Interplay Productions, was released in 1997, and was followed by Fallout 2 the very next year. 

But it would take another decade for Fallout 3 to arrive, this time made by Bethesda Game Studios after buying the Fallout license from the bankrupt Interplay and changing the game into a real-time, open world, first- and third-person shooter. The rest is Fallout history.

In a video published by Bethesda this week (embedded below), members of the Fallout 3 team shared their memories of taking over the development of the series—including Todd Howard, who served as Fallout 3's game director. Turns out Howard received the earth-shaking news that Bethesda had acquired the license for Fallout the same way I remind myself to take vitamins: with a Post-It note.

"I can remember this," Howard says in the video. "Coming back to my desk, and Todd Vaughn, our VP of development here at Bethesda, had left a yellow sticky note on my keyboard, and it said 'Fallout's yours.' That's all it said. I'll never forget that."

Howard's reaction wasn't quite as restrained. "I think I screamed and ran around the studio," he says. "Because everyone at the team had heard this might be a possibility."

Fallout 3 was first shown at E3 in Santa Monica in 2008. Pete Hines, senior VP of global marketing and communications, says it was important to Howard that Tim Cain, producer of the original Fallout, approved of the new direction Bethesda was taking with Fallout 3.

"We need to make sure the Fallout guy likes the Fallout that we're making," says Hines.

Cain had his reservations, though. "I kinda felt like my baby had been adopted by another family," Cain says. "It wasn't so much that I didn't like the family. It's just my baby was going to be raised differently than I would raise this baby."

While Hines sweated over Cain's reaction, he needn't have worried. "It was mesmerizing. It was immersive. It was incredible," Cain says of seeing Fallout in first-person for the first time. "I especially loved when you actually got to leave the Vault and the light came up and you saw the Wasteland."

"That was a big watershed moment in some ways," says Hines. "Wanting to do right by Fallout meant you go back to the folks who came up with this stuff and said, 'Hey, here's what we're doing.'"

The next time I tell someone I love chocolate, a voice in the back of my head will be calling me a liar. Love? It'll say. You only like chocolate. Tim Cain? Tim Cain loves chocolate. I talked to the co-director of The Outer Worlds a week after its successful launch, eager to ask what was next, but first we ended up talking about chocolate. 

It ties back into The Outer Worlds, though. I promise.

"We usually have chocolate meetings now," he says as soon as we start talking. "Every day at 2:30, I send out on a chocolate Slack channel that I have new chocolate. We had enough bandwidth it deserved its own channel. I usually send out the [details]: If it's single origin, what country it's from, the cacao percentage, any flavoring agents. We all eat a piece and we talk about it and then I blog it, and so that way I have a list of everything chocolate I've eaten since 1993 and whether I liked it."

That's a cool 26 years of dedicated chocolate logging, which means that since well before he made Fallout, Tim Cain has been refining his cacoa palate. With development wrapped, The Outer Worlds may not need daily chocolate meetings anymore, but the team at Obsidian still managed to immortalize this particular idiosyncrasy in the game itself. Like the best Easter eggs, this one only means something when you learn a little bit about the people behind it.

"We have our own chocolate variant called CCN 76" in The Outer Worlds, Cain says. "Right before we certed the base game, I caught my lead designer—he tried to sneak in 'Tim Cain's White Chocolate Yummies' and I found it, because it was a piece of text."

Important Tim Cain fact: He loves chocolate, but white chocolate? Nah. Mostly trash, though he admits he's had a few good ones in 26 years. Back to the Easter Egg."So I found the thing and I deleted it all. Unbeknownst to me, and I discovered this after we certed, he went to an artist and had them write that into the art. So you can't search for it and it's on a character that you were highly unlikely to kill. But he didn't know I was playing a game where I was killing everybody, because I wanted to make sure you could do that and it's fun. I killed that person and [saw it] and then I went to his office but it was too late, we had already certed. So it's in the game."

They got him.

It doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that chocolate played an important role in The Outer Worlds' development. In the town of Roseway, there's a bar called the 17th Bar, and it, too, is the result of a complex prank on Tim Cain.

"Somebody, about halfway through development, hid 17 white chocolate bars in my office," Cain says. "There was a note on my desk made of cutout letters. They put a lot of time into this. It looked like a ransom note and said, 'I've hidden 17 bars of white chocolate in your room. Have fun.' Knowing I hate it.

"I looked everywhere. The first day I could only find 13. Over the next week, week and a half, I found another three. I never found the 17th one. So then Tyson, the level designer, he was sitting next door. He put a bar in Roseway called The 17th Bar, that you can go and get drinks at. When you walk in, it's got that big flickering light and he says, "I just wanted you to remember the 17th bar." So talk about an Easter egg that doesn't mean anything, except to people who were here at Obsidian working on this project."

Cain and his co-director Leonard Boyarsky knew what they had to live up to with The Outer Worlds, shipping an Obsidian RPG—especially since they created Fallout, and Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style since 2010's New Vegas. Before they even had concept artists, they'd written more than 100 pages of worldbuilding material, defining voice and technology and corporations down to specific word choices: Robots have circuit boards, but they don't have chips.

"We got really picky like that. For me, I want to know that 10 years from now, when I'm probably not working on this, that it's still the game I imagined," he says. "Plus, I saw Fallout going in a different direction. No fault of their own—we didn't leave a lot of notes around. So as people started working on it, they had to play the game and go, 'I think this is what they meant...'"

They did their best to cross every T and dot every I, but what ended up being most surprising about The Outer Worlds was its painless launch. That's the other thing Obsidian's games in this style, like New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic 2, are known for: Being a bit buggy.

Cain says they were prepared to crunch after release, fixing crashes and issues players ran into. But it was so smooth, they've been able to take a breather and take some time before the first patch, which should be out soon, and respond to some more substantial feedback.

"Somebody found a place that it consistently crashed, but just on one platform, and then there's been another bug where sometimes companions get in a bad state in your ship," Cain says. "But for the most part the things we're fixing are things people have asked for, like larger fonts."

Another quality of life issue he intends to fix is that vending machines don't show how much you're carrying, which makes selling items while over-encumbered a tedious process. There's also difficulty, which came as a surprise: Many players have asked for a harder setting that doesn't come with the restrictions of the Supernova difficulty. He's got a list of UI things to address, and hopes to put out a second update around Christmas, once more player feedback comes in. But when we spoke, it was definitely time for a well-earned victory lap.

I asked Cain about the creation of one of our favorite characters in The Outer Worlds, the robot SAM. The idea for SAM, a no-personality no-illusions-of-humanity plain' ol robot, was to build a companion for players who wanted to play without the "peskiness" of companions having their own sidequests, but with some of their advantages.

Writer Megan Starks took on Sam, and Cain told her: "It's not sentient. But it's programmed to be upbeat, trying to be helpful. It seems everything through the lens of its programming, which is, 'I clean things."

"She wrote some really awesome stuff, Cain says. It says things sometimes that you're like, is it being meta? It's saying something just about cleaning but it's actually sometimes social commentary, too. We had originally thought he was going to be more robotic and it was Megan who said, 'I think it should sound like they recorded a salesman at the factory, who was super excited like, 'Oh my God, I get to be the voice of a robot.'"

So far The Outer Worlds seems to be the kind of success story that makes you wonder why Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style for so long. According to Cain, it wasn't for lack of wanting—it's just been hard to get them made.

"This is the form of a game I love to play," he says. "It's not necessarily open world, because we get tighter control over what kind of narrative we tell. Hub and spoke, is what a lot of people call it. First-person gives us a cool immersion. I know Leonard mentioned once years ago that we had already planned to take Fallout first person after Fallout 2.

"I don't know why a lot of publishers think nobody wants to play this. Part of the reason Obsidian hasn't done it, is because publishers didn't want them. Now Microsoft, I think, is going to keep making stuff in this vein, because this looks so popular. But I can tell you three years ago, not a lot of people were interested in this style of game and Private Division took a chance, and they were really good."

For now, he's got a few months of work ahead to take feedback on The Outer Worlds and prepare that second patch. After that? Well, nothing's official, but it sounds like there's more Space Capitalism ahead.

"I want people to play for awhile and then see what the friction points are and see if there are bugs we missed, put out something before or after Christmas and then think about sequel," says Cain with perhaps just a bit of a twinkle in his eye. "I don't think we're probably going to talk about that. But I'm thinking about it."