Fallout's origin can be traced back to a pizza party Tim Cain threw

A tough Vault Dweller from an ad for the original Fallout by Simon Bisley

(Image credit: Interplay)

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.'

"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."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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