Fallout 1 and 2's source code isn't lost after all, thanks to one hero programmer: 'I made it a quest to snapshot everything'

Vault Boy demonstrates how to duck and cover

(Image credit: GOG.com)

Tim Cain, lead developer of the original Fallout, recently lamented the loss of Fallout's earliest development materials. When he left Interplay he was told to delete his copies of early builds and even his notes from development meetings, and apparently Interplay has since lost not only the source code but also the original Fallout artwork and the clay models that were scanned to make the 3D talking heads some of its NPCs are blessed with.

Fortunately, it turns out Interplay cofounder and programmer Rebecca Heineman kept copies of the source code for Fallout 1 and 2, as she told VideoGamer.

In 1993, Interplay published a CD collecting one game it published in each of the previous 10 years, including Battle Chess, Bard's Tale, The Lord of the Rings Vol. I, and the original Wasteland. Heineman put the anthology together using her own copies of the source code of those games, except for Wasteland. When she went looking for it, she discovered others weren't putting as much effort into backups.

From then on Heineman took snapshots of the code for each game she worked on at Interplay, as well as those she ported for MacPlay—which was originally a division of Interplay before being licensed out.

PRODUCTS

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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