When he went from Interplay to the late 90s, Tim Cain explains that he was ordered to delete everything he had in his possession about Fallout. « When I left the studio, I was told: ‘you have to destroy everything’ and I did it “Explains the producer on his YouTube channel. “” All my archives, my first design notes, the source code of the different versions, the prototypes, the whole code gurps have disappeared. »
If Interplay made such a request, it is therefore to protect the rights of a franchise that belonged to him. The catch is that the company, in turn, lost everything and realized it afterwards, probably when reselling the franchise in Bethesda. “” When they contacted me, a few years after my departure, to say ‘oops, we lost everything’, I thought they trapped me, in ‘we will sue you if you say that you have kept everything.’ In fact, no, they had really lost everything. You can imagine you in pying behind your screen and as you can imagine, the first dumbfounded is none other than Cain itself. “” The amount of information lost on Fallout And his beginnings saddens me. I had them. I had them in digital form and I was ordered to destroy them. »
« Many organizations are entrusted with the management of the archives, but they are doing very badly. They lose the resources they were responsible for. It happened to me several times during my career “Continue the developer. “” The code of so many other games released in the 1970s, 80s and 90s has disappeared. The graphic elements have disappeared. Of course, we can try to open the databases and extract these elements, but we get that the end result. We do not obtain the source code or the original illustrations. I think this is even the case for the 2000s, 2010 and probably now for the 2020s. Things get lost. »
Saved by the gong
However, this story has a happy ending. Rebecca Heineman, Co-founder of Interplay, contacted the Videogamer media to report that she had saved the source code of Fallout et Fallout 2. In the early 1990s, Heineman was made aware of the preservation of the media when she worked on compilation Interplay’s 10 Year Anthology : Classic Collection And realized that the data was very poorly preserved, as for the C-RPG Cult Wasteland.
« Wasteland had been brought to PC by someone else, so I asked that I am given the source code and that I was answered with a sink of fried merlan. I went to the COO office and he gave me a large cardboard box that seemed to have been crushed by a 36 tonnes. There were bits of source code on floppy disks. I ended up contacting friends at Electronic Arts to recover the copy of the source code that had been sent to them for the distribution. A revealing experience for Heineman, who made sure to keep a copy of absolutely all the games when he left interplay in 1995.
« Interplay did not like the employees to leave the company, and if you resign, they were … stamped. I was a co-founder, so when I left, I kept everything. For FalloutI carried out the Mac porting through my MacPlay company, so I have the source code of Fallout et Fallout 2. I don’t have Tim notes [Cain] or other preparatory content. But the source code is not lost. Interplay had the reputation of being very litigious if an employee was debauched and if he kept content at home. But in truth, they had no legal basis to act; Otherwise, I would have been sprayed before the courts. »
In short, we imagine that Tim Cain will very quickly recover from his old owner, and this is potentially a good sign for a reissue with great fanfare of the first Fallout. Cross your fingers.
