Damn.
Tim is fucking cranking out videos like crazy.
Once he runs out of topics to discuss about, what will he do? Twitch streams?
Most likely whole lot of nothing. He mentions in his video about the notes that record-keeping has been an ingrained habit, those notes are a part of him at this point - that's how he remembers so much, they go back decades.
He's simply converting his notes into a publicly accessible format, so that they exist on the Internet in one form or another - no different than that time when he digitized all of his notebooks.
A bit macabre, to be honest, considering how important they're to him. Feels like watching somebody at the sunset of his career chiseling his own headstone. Very Churchill-like, if you will.
On the other hand he says everyone was also on the same page on The Outer Worlds.
Also, everything is couched in terms of the team rather than the designer's vision, yet FO1's team was mostly working independently, and their unity of vision was evidently a fluke.
I don't think there's an inherent contradiction here. There was a unity of vision, it just wasn't centralized, and nobody questioned it because it was the status quo.
If you listen to the video where he list his inspirations for Fallout's setting, he rattles them off one by one, going from the memory(and notes, of course) - there's Canticle for Leibowitz, he was watching Mad Max 2 on repeat with Boyarski, he was GM'ing GURPS for his friends at the time so on and so forth. And every item on his list of inspirations, be they incredibly specific things Tim grew up with, or the IPs with broader appeal he picked up in his early adulthood was also on every nerd's radar at the time. See, when he mentions Zelazny now, he's name dropping a classic, but Zelazny was still alive and very popular in early 90s - a household name for fantasy fans. Ditto for the other sources of inspiration he brings up.
So of course Tim knows every single brick that went into the foundation of Fallout is because it was informed by the media he grew up with, his zeitgeist, if you will - and at the time his team was staffed by people immersed in the same cultural context, people just like him. These people understood each other, understood what they were building, and they've had the common building blocks. All that remained was putting them together. And even when somebody strayed from the vision, he was course corrected using the same common language. There was a unity of vision - but it was also completely accidental, a byproduct of being a specific person at a specific time.
This also explains the Outer Worlds. Tim's approach typifies the designers of the era - a lot of notable figures from the 90s regurgitated at least as much as they designed, and for a while all was well - until, as the decades went by and the 2010s were in full swing, there was no more Good Old Content. As the media around them changed and they were slowly deprived of viable sources of inspiration, they were left with suboptimal material - uninspired, predictable.
Secondary. They now had to make tertiary content based on secondary content. So what could they do with it? Outer Worlds. They made Outer Worlds.
This is a cautionary tale for designers and writers. If you want to make something interesting, you need to curate your references very carefully, you can't just rely on popular culture, you need education and familiarity with the subject. You create what you know. If the media you're immersed in is trash, you will only increase the garbage pile.
