Fallout Creator Tim Cain Alleges Forced Destruction of Game Development Archives: The Fight Against Preservation Continues

As time goes on, the importance of game preservation increases every year, and you can count Tim Cain, one of the creators behind Fallout, among those advocating for a more dedicated method to safeguarding video game heritage. Cain understands the challenges involved in maintaining these assets better than most—indeed, upon leaving Interplay, he was instructed to discard his personal Fallout archives.

Cain states that many organizations claim to be the archiving authority but often perform very poorly in this role, new YouTube vlog They forfeit the possessions under their guardianship. This issue has occurred numerous times throughout my professional journey. Upon departing from Fallout, I received instructions stating ‘all materials must be eradicated,’ and so I complied. Every part of my collection vanished—initial concept papers, various drafts' source codes, experimental models, along with all the GURPS coding.

Cain mentions that Interplay planned to maintain an internal archive, but "it got misplaced." By the time he had departed a few years earlier, when they reached out to him and admitted "Oops, we lost it," he suspected they might be attempting to deceive him with "We will take legal action against you if you claim to possess it." However, as it turned out, they genuinely could not find it.

Cain mentions that the code for the retail edition of Fallout was ultimately retrieved, yet numerous components utilized during the development of this role-playing game remain missing. According to him, both the initial artworks and the first iteration of the title, which incorporated the GURPS tabletop framework, are now vanished. Additionally, he states that the tangible clay prototypes employed to craft the speaking characters in the inaugural Fallout titles have been misplaced as well.

Although game preservation frequently gets mixed up with the accessibility of games on contemporary platforms, genuine preservation efforts carried out by groups such as the Game Preservation Society focus on different aspects. Video Game History Foundation It’s far more focused on preserving the history and background surrounding the making of games, similar to the development materials Cain discusses here.

Although certain businesses are now treating conservation with seriousness, similar to what we've observed with PlayStation's massive internal archive As Cain points out, this hasn’t consistently been true throughout history and remains far from being a universal practice even now. He mentions that “there are people and groups who deliberately try to hinder conservation efforts.” This sentiment is further emphasized when he expresses his disappointment over the significant losses related to Fallout and its initial stages of creation. He recalls having such materials in digital format but was instructed to delete them all.

Despite how well Fallout has been maintained, Cain remains convinced that it will continue to be widely recognized far into the future. He states, "The popularity of this intellectual property largely owes itself to Bethesda’s efforts, which ensures it will be recalled even 50 years or perhaps a full century from now."

Many other titles released during the '70s, '80s, and '90s have had their code vanish," says Cain. "The artwork has disappeared too. While one might attempt to access these game databases and extract elements from them, what we get are merely the end products. We do not obtain the initial source code or the original artworks. This loss seems to extend into the '00s and '10s as well, possibly even continuing through this decade of the '20s. It’s clear that content continues to be lost over time.

Always remember the effort it took to achieve this. best RPGs to life.

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