As the title says this thread will serve as an aggregate of interviews with people involved in RPG business for easier searching and accessibility.
First post will be dedicated to Tim Cain and I'll edit it and add more interviews with him if they appear. 2nd post to Leonard Boyarsky, 3rd to someone else, etc. Hopefully more people will participate and mods will fix it™. Also, for now I'll post full interviews only for those interviews that can't be found anywhere on the net (so those that weren't translated to English for example) and add links for the rest unless you have a different idea. Unless the mods will decide that this thread is pointless/retarded and will delete it/move it.
TIM CAIN
Interview #1 published in Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay:
DGC Ep 033: Interview with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky (podcast interview with Boyarsky and Cain)
Interview #3
RPG Codex Retrospective Interview: Tim Cain on Fallout, Troika and RPG Design
Interview #4
Matt Chat 66: Tim Cain interview
Interview #5
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ime-travel-sentient-dinosaurs-fantasy-planets
Interview #6
Presentation at GDC in 2012:
First post will be dedicated to Tim Cain and I'll edit it and add more interviews with him if they appear. 2nd post to Leonard Boyarsky, 3rd to someone else, etc. Hopefully more people will participate and mods will fix it™. Also, for now I'll post full interviews only for those interviews that can't be found anywhere on the net (so those that weren't translated to English for example) and add links for the rest unless you have a different idea. Unless the mods will decide that this thread is pointless/retarded and will delete it/move it.
TIM CAIN
Interview #1 published in Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay:
Ramsay: Tell me about the day you left Interplay. Why did you leave? What were you thinking?
Cain: While Fallout was in production, I was unhappy at how development worked at Interplay. People who didn’t play games, or didn’t even seem to like games, were making decisions about how to market the game, what features it should have, and when it should ship.
Worse, decisions were being made that changed the game and required us to do substantial changes, and these decisions could and should have been made months earlier. For example, the UK office said no children could be harmed in the game, but children had been in the design for years. Another example: Interplay spent a lot of money for an external marketing agency to develop treatments for the box and ad, and they were terrible.
My artists produced better work on their own time, but marketing did not want to use them. However, when Interplay’s president, Brian Fargo, saw their work, he liked what he saw, so the art was used. My role as producer appeared to consist of arguing with people and trying to defend the game from devolving into a lesser product.
In July 1997—Fallout would ship three months later in October—I had decided that I did not want to work on Fallout 2. I submitted to my boss, Feargus Urquhart, a review for my line producer Fred Hatch that recommended he should be promoted to associate producer and assigned Fallout 2. Although the review was not processed, Feargus gave Fred the game to see how he would perform. When the first designs were submitted, I really didn’t like them. Neither did Feargus, nor did Brian Fargo.
Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who were the two artists and designers on Fallout with whom I would later start Troika, didn’t feel any different either. So, Leonard and Jason wrote a different storyline for the game, which Brian liked more, but he told me he’d like to see what I could do. When I asked Feargus about Fred’s promotion—his review was now long overdue—he told me that while he wouldn’t make me do Fallout 2, the promotion wasn’t going to happen, and Fred wouldn’t get the sequel.
Feargus planned to give Fallout 2 to the producer of Descent to Undermountain if I didn’t take it. While I personally liked that producer, I hated Descent. I thought the sequel would suffer under similar direction. I told Feargus that I would do the sequel and began working on a design.
Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I informed Feargus that I was thinking of quitting. I wanted him to know how I was feeling about development and how deeply I had been affected. I was worried that the same problems I had experienced during the development of Fallout would persist during the making of Fallout 2. Feargus said he understood.
When I returned, he asked if I had made a decision. I had not, and so I began work on Fallout 2. I worked out a new design and made an aggressive schedule to get the game out by the end of October 1998. I then started working on the game as lead designer and producer.
But the same problems resurfaced. For example, to save time and money, I had decided to have the same internal artists make the box for Fallout 2. Feargus was upset that I had made such a decision without consulting him, but when I talked to Marketing, they were fine with the idea. But then Sales decided to change the box size and style, which would create problems for making the second box look similar to the first. In a meeting with Sales where Feargus was present, I was told that the decision was made and “there will be no further discussion on it.”
I decided I had enough. Leonard and Jason, who could tell I was unhappy, had told me weeks earlier that they were unwilling to work on the sequel without me. Rather than simply quit, I remembered that Brian had told me years ago, after a programmer had quit under bad circumstances, that he wished people would come and talk to him rather than quit.
I went to Brian in December and told him that I was unhappy and wanted to quit. I decided to be frank and honest, and told him that other people also weren’t happy and might resign with me. He wanted names. I told him about Leonard and Jason. Other people declined to be mentioned.
Throughout December and January, the three of us met with Brian to discuss the problems and see what solutions might be found. We wanted to meet with Brian as a group to prevent any misunderstandings that might arise from separate meetings. In fact, I wanted Feargus there, too, but Brian only included him once toward the end. Brian seemed surprised that I was getting resistance to doing Fallout 2 my way. His attitude was, “You did well on the first game, so just do it again on the second.”
Unfortunately, this meant running to Brian whenever anyone tried to force their own ideas into the game, which didn’t seem like a good working environment. We discussed this problem and raised other issues at these meetings, such as converting our bonus plan to a royalty-based plan. Brian did not like the idea of royalties. As for how to handle creative control, Brian said I could divide the responsibilities with Feargus, so I could handle Marketing and other departments directly, and they would have to effectively treat me as a division director. This seemed unsatisfactory to me, but Feargus seemed very unhappy that his own authority and responsibilities concerning Fallout 2 would be greatly reduced in this plan.
It was unclear how some issues would get resolved, such as budgeting for equipment and maintenance, since I didn’t have a division director’s budget. Brian handwaved these issues, saying that we’d work them out.
At that point, I regretted not abiding my original instinct to walk out and trying to work things out with Brian. In mid-January, I decided to leave the com-pany. I told Feargus, who accepted my resignation and asked me to work until the end of the month. We went to talk to Trish Wright, the executive producer, who was unhappy to see me leave but accepted it. She warned me that Brian might be very upset, but I wanted to tell him that day. I returned to my office and told Leonard and Jason that I had quit, effective at the end of the month. Then I went and told Brian.
As expected, he was not happy. We talked for an hour, but the meeting was cut short because I had a dental appointment. While I was at the dentist, Leonard and Jason also decided to tender their resignations. I didn’t speak to Brian after that day, and I finished out the month with my team.
My team was surprised and unhappy, having heard nothing of my months of meetings with Brian. I met with them to make sure the design for Fallout 2 was up-to-date. And I met with Feargus; my replacement, Eric Demilt, who would produce Fallout 2; and other designers, such as Chris Avellone and Zeb Cook, who would assume my design responsibilities.
I made sure that everyone understood the new design and where all of my documents were located on the local network. Phil Adam, the head of human resources, met with me once, to get my view on why I was leaving, but I otherwise did not interact with Brian or the administration.
On my last day, I packed my personal effects and went to Human Resources to process out. I was redirected to Legal, where I was asked to sign a letter that reminded me of my confidentiality agreement. I learned later that Leonard and Jason were not asked to sign such a letter. And then I went home, wondering what to do, now that I had a good title under my belt but had effectively cut ties with my last company.
Ramsay: When did you approach Leonard and Jason about Troika?
Cain: I talked to Leonard and Jason the day after we quit about their plans. None of us had approached any companies before we quit Interplay. Personally, I was too busy trying to document my plans for Fallout 2 to even think about what to do next. So, we sat down and talked about what we liked about Fallout and what we didn’t like, and one theme became clear: we really wanted to make a fantasy computer role-playing game.
We had avoided the fantasy genre when we made Fallout, and that was a conscious decision to distance ourselves from the large number of competitors already on the shelves, such as the Ultima series, the Might & Magic series, and all of the games based on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). But we felt that we had earned the right to work in that genre, and we had a number of ideas that would make our game stand out.
The desire to mix magic and technology was present from the outset of our talks, so really, you could say that the basis for Arcanum formed very quickly. We wrote down our ideas for technology levels, for the effects of technology on classic fantasy races like elves and orcs, and for the role of magic in such a world. Everything seemed to come together very quickly, and we were pleased with our outline for the game.
Originally, we never planned to make our own company. None of us were businessmen, but we did enjoy working together. We went to several local companies, such as Blizzard and Virgin, but they were more interested in hiring us to work on one of their existing games under development than to work on an original game. After a few weeks, we figured that our game would only be made if we formed our own development company and found a publisher, so we switched tactics and began approaching companies for a contract and not for employment. That’s when we created Troika.
The name came from something that Feargus would call us back when we worked on Fallout. As producer, I would be responsible for signing off on various game assets, such as the manual, the box cover, and any advertisements. However, I am not very artistic, and I am color-blind as well, so I would usually bring Leonard and Jason along with me to check that the art was appropriate on these assets. Feargus started calling us “the Troika,” and after we had left Interplay and thought about making our own company, we liked that phrase enough to use it for our company name.
We incorporated on a suitable date: April 1, 1998. We didn’t get a publishing deal until summer. We worked out of our homes until we moved into offices in October. And that’s when Troika really began.
Ramsay: None of you had experience on the business side of running a studio. Did you find someone to play that role?
Cain: We never did get a business person. In hindsight, that was probably our biggest mistake. We would work on a game until it was finished, then we would scramble to find our next contract. We should have had someone whose full-time job was to secure funding for us, so we could concentrate on making games. Instead, we were always overworked and stressed. We did find a great lawyer who specialized in legal contracts in the game industry, but that only helped after we found a deal.
Ramsay: How did you chart out the future of the company? Did you at least go through the business-planning process?
Cain: We didn’t chart out anything. We tried to get our first contract, and we did. As soon as we had it, we concentrated on nothing else. We focused on that game—designing it, programming it, and producing its art assets. We were developers first and foremost. Running the business was an afterthought—an extra chore that we did between developing games.
Ramsay: What happened next? What was your first challenge?
Cain: Our first big challenge after incorporating was finding a publishing deal. None of us had any contacts in the industry, so we just cold-called places. We went to Activision, Sony, and a few other big publishers, but everyone seemed more interested in hiring us than funding us. Finally, six months after we quit Interplay and four months after forming Troika, when we were feeling the most despondent, we got a call from Sierra that changed everything.
Scott Lynch was a newly promoted vice president of development at Sierra, and he had loved Fallout. Scott was very excited about our ideas for Arcanum, and more importantly, he wanted to get us signed quickly so we could get started on it. He was even willing to make unheard-of—at least to us—concessions in the contract, so that we could get funded quickly. I think the whole negotiation period took less than a month. And we had a great contract! The big challenge now? They wanted a working prototype of the game in 90 days.
Ramsay: Then you began hiring the first employees?
Cain: Ninety days was insane, but we didn’t know it. We were excited to get the contract. We had come off Fallout and Fallout 2 at Black Isle, where we had worked crazy hours. I worked up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three months of Fallout. I figured I could do that again.
The working prototype that Sierra wanted was a sample level from the game. They wanted the player to be able to walk around, cast some spells, and engage in combat. They wanted one or two creatures to fight, a structure of some kind to enter, and some interesting effects. And we decided to do particle effects and real-time shadows. Of course, they also wanted a user interface on top of everything.
Unfortunately, the programming challenge proved to be beyond my abilities in that time frame. Since Sierra was paying us for the prototype, we used some of that money to hire another programmer, and the two of us worked crazy hours along with Leonard and Jason to get that prototype done. We started from nothing—no code base, no art, nothing. And we managed to make a really good prototype.
Ramsay: What was the size of your team during prototype development? How large did the Arcanum team eventually grow?
Cain: There were just the four of us: we three founders and one additional programmer. When we finished the prototype and Sierra accepted it, we rented office space in Irvine and were joined by three more people. Over the next few months, we hired five more, for a total of twelve people. I am still amazed to this day that we developed Arcanum with only twelve people. For three years, we worked long days—between ten to fourteen hours per day—and most weekends, usually Saturday and sometimes Sunday, too. This is what you can do when you are young, idealistic, and optimistic.
Ramsay: There were no concerns about crunch, quality of life, and the impact on productivity? How did you reward employees for performance?
Cain: When we hired everyone, we told them we wanted to keep the company small and lean. While we knew there would be long hours, everyone would have opportunities to work in many different areas of the game and have ownership of those areas. That’s why the credits for Arcanum simply state our names and not any titles. All of us made Arcanum. We blurred the lines between programmers, artists, and designers—hence the name of our company. One person would create animations and write dialogue, while another would implement combat and design quests. We were kind of like communists, which made our company name even more appropriate.
In that communist vein, we also decided to pay everyone the same salary, so we hired only senior, experienced people. If the game brought in any money, we would split the amount 50/50. Half would go to the company and funding our next game. The other half would be split evenly among us. At the end of the project, that’s exactly what we did.
Ramsay: You were working long hours, with undifferentiated roles, hiring only experienced people, and paying employees without concern for merit. That doesn’t sound like a sustainable model.
Cain: We couldn’t keep working at this pace or with this flat hierarchy. It was difficult to plan a schedule when everyone had an equal say in all matters, and we felt that we needed to structure our team better.
After Arcanum shipped, we rearranged ourselves into a hierarchy with leads, seniors, and staff members. We planned our design work carefully, trying to avoid the crushingly long hours we had endured for the last three years. We started working on a Lord of the Rings game using the Arcanum engine but with a completely different art style. We worked with Sierra and the Tolkien estate, and we created a really fascinating storyline for the player, which paralleled the original fellowship storyline. But Sierra pulled the development into one of their internal teams, which was extremely disappointing. Then out of the blue, we ended up being courted by two different publishers, and both of them had offers to work on licensed games.
We accepted both offers and split into two groups. One group worked on a D&D game for Atari, while another began work on a White Wolf Vampire game for Activision. I was in charge of the first group, while Leonard and Jason headed up the second.
Ramsay: These games were The Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, right? Were you able to reuse the Arcanum engine?
Cain: Yes, we used a heavily modified Arcanum engine for Temple. We were lucky that we had reserved the rights to the engine in our contract with Sierra, because they retained the rights to the property. The new engine used 3D models for the characters instead of 2D sprites, and the background art contained masks to let the 3D characters pass behind the 2D background images.
Of course, we converted all of the system mechanics to D&D version 3, and then 16 months into the project, we converted the mechanics to 3.5. I am very proud of the game for being completed in 20 months. It may not be my finest work, but it was done quickly and is incredibly feature-rich for such a fast project.
On the other hand, Vampire was done using Valve’s Source engine. That’s the same engine used for Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and many other games. In fact, we were the first external developer to make a game with Source. We actually finished Vampire before Half-Life 2, but we could not release our game before Valve released their game.
Ramsay: When you were negotiating with Sierra, did you try to obtain the rights to Arcanum? Why did you keep the rights to the technology instead? Would you recommend asking for technology rights to other developers?
Cain: We tried to keep the rights to Arcanum, but Sierra was investing 100% of the capital. They really wouldn’t budge on this issue. So, we asked for the rights to keep all technology involved in its development, including all tools and the engine itself. Sierra agreed, which was a delightful surprise.
I advise startups to ask for whatever they want. The worst a publisher can do is say no, and they probably will, if they are providing the majority of the funding. But sometimes they will give you what you want. We were able to make Temple so quickly because we already had an engine ready to use.
Ramsay: Temple had a very short development cycle, and the mechanics were revised during the last stretch. What went right? What suffered? If you had more time, how would the game have been different?
Cain: The original schedule for Temple was 18 months, which was and is unthinkable for a full-featured role-playing game. I tried to convince Atari that we needed more time. When I failed, I reduced the scope of the project and cut several classes from the design, including the druid and the bard, both of which had many specialized rules for their abilities. Atari asked for those classes to be restored, implying that the game contract depended on it, so I added them back. But very little manpower was available for design. I hoped that by picking a classic module for the base design that I would save many hours of design time, but we could have probably made a better product in that time frame by developing our own game world.
What suffered? Well, we had very little time to write dialogue, or develop quest lines, or balance treasure amounts. Our tight schedule left only two people, Tom Decker and myself, any time to do these tasks. I was also the producer, and Tom was in charge of localization. We had too many chores and not enough time to do them. It certainly didn’t help that, in the middle of development, Wizards of the Coast published the D&D 3.5 core rules revisions. We had a difficult choice: launch the game with out-of-date mechanics or change those mechanics in the face of an already tight deadline. I asked Atari for more time, specifically for three months. I told them that this was an issue they should have foreseen. Did they not know about the revisions? But they didn’t want to budge. Finally, they gave us an extra two months, bringing us up to twenty months.
In that time frame, we did a great job on the combat system, which was a masterful interpretation of the D&D rules married with an intuitive interface. Even people who did not play D&D could quickly grasp basic combat, and many of the more advanced combat feats were supported as well. I think it helped us immensely that many of our programming staff were D&D fans, and they already knew the rules very well.
In hindsight, given a longer schedule, we would have made our own IP instead of using The Temple of Elemental Evil, and I believe that world would have had the rich characters and storylines that people had come to expect from Troika. And, of course, the game would have shipped with fewer bugs and design issues than it did. But that is starting to sound like the moral of the Troika story: if we only had more time.
Ramsay: Troika also had some trouble with release timing. How did Valve’s embargo on Vampire impact the company?
Cain: Well, the embargo caused several problems. First, while the game was held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We’d have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn’t let that happen. They picked a version as the gold master for duplication, and then they held that version close until the ship date. We fixed some bugs, but they didn’t want to pass new builds to quality assurance.
Second, while our game was being held, Valve continued to make improvements to the Source engine—improvements we couldn’t add to our game. It was frustrating to play Half-Life 2 and see advancements in physics, modeling, facial animation, and other features that our game did not have.
Finally, the embargo really demoralized the team. They had finished a game that couldn’t be shipped, or changed, or talked about. And when Vampire was shipped, the game was compared unfavorably to the only other Source game on the market. Needless to say, we lost some good people during that time. They quit in frustration and went elsewhere.
Ramsay: Even if there was a need for the title to be published before Half-Life 2, Valve made that impossible. Why did Activision freeze the project?
Cain: Just to be clear, I came over to the Vampire team after the first two years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never interacted with Activision during development.
With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three years. While that’s not a long time for a role-playing game—Fallout had taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made almost a decade earlier—Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.
Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of these problems?
Cain: Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character.
We were also working on smoothing out the walking animations of characters during in-game cinematic sequences. The embargo occurred during the middle of this process, which left a great many characters skating or stuttering during those sequences. And the warrens near the end of the game were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No balancing or dialogue was added at all.
I don’t have to restate how demoralizing these issues were to the team. All of these problems were easily solvable with more time, but that time was not available.
Ramsay: Was there any ill will toward Valve?
Cain: No, we weren’t really angry with Valve. They made their deal with Activision, and part of that deal was that any Source-based game had to be shipped after their Half-Life 2. Valve had the luxury of pushing out their ship date repeatedly—and they did—to ensure that their game was great. We were hoping for the same luxury, but Activision didn’t grant it.
Now Activision, on the other hand, did get a bit of our ire. When we discovered that we could not ship before Valve, we never imagined that Activision would ship Vampire on the same day as Half-Life 2. For several reasons, a much better idea would have been to ship Vampire a couple of months later. It would have given us time to polish our game with a stable engine. It would have given the consumer something else to buy that used the Source engine after Half-Life 2. And a later release would also not have put us in direct competition for consumer dollars during our important first few weeks on store shelves, because we all knew that consumers were going to choose Half-Life 2 over Vampire. And, really, was the cost of a few more months of development really that much more than the years we had already spent on the game? No, I may not be a businessman, but that seemed like a bad choice on Activision’s part.
Ramsay: Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Did Leonard or Jason make these arguments to Activision?
Cain: Leonard did a lot of the interacting with Activision, and he did suggest this course of action many times. As far as I knew, Activision either ignored the suggestion or complained about how much time Vampire had already taken. They really did not want to put any more money into the game than they absolutely had to, but at the same time, they demanded triple-A quality. It was quite schizophrenic.
Ramsay: In the end, this ordeal brought about the collapse of Troika? What happened after Vampire shipped?
Cain: Leonard, Jason, and I went looking for a new contract even before Vampire shipped, since we were done a few months before. Leonard pursued Fallout 3, which ultimately went to Bethesda, who outbid us. I landed us a contract with the Department of Defense to modify Temple to make it a training ground for military artificial intelligence. The idea of military AI learning in a Dungeons & Dragons world amused me to no end. But that contract only covered three people for about six months. After a few months of searching, we ended up laying off half of the employees, with severance pay, so we could keep the office open.
We actually had the opportunity to get contracts for several different games, but none of them were role-playing games, and none of them were games that I had any interest in playing. Leonard wanted to take them to tide us over, but I didn’t want to do that. I figured, why should we have a company if we were not making the games we wanted to make?
I didn’t particularly enjoy running a business, and Leonard and Jason didn’t either, so we decided to shut down Troika while we were still in the black. We could pay our remaining employees severance and insurance, so they could find other employment, and we kept the office open for a month to make their transitions easier. In fact, we kept Troika going as a business for six months, with me running it from my house, so employees could file for insurance under COBRA, which is easy and fairly automatic. If we had closed, they would have had to apply for HIPPA, which is much more complicated. It was the best we could do.
In the end, Vampire shipped in November 2004. We closed the office in February. And Troika officially ceased to be a company in September 2005.
Ramsay: Looking back, do you think you should have pursued contracts for the games you didn’t want to do? In several months to a year, there might have been more attractive opportunities.
Cain: Oh, I think I will always wonder about that, but honestly, I have no regrets. Troika was a wonderful experience while it lasted, but I am not a businessman. I did not want to live a life of pursuing one contract after another, of negotiating with publishers, or of dealing with employees and landlords. I got into this business to make games, and I am getting to do that more as someone else’s employee than as a company owner.
Ramsay: Would you say that Troika was your first and last venture?
Cain: I will never say never, but yes, it’s very likely that I will never start my own company again. Owning your own company is something that many people dream about, but I’ve been there and done that. It’s just not for me. Now with that said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of making a game on my own, smaller in scope than my previous games and something designed for a particular platform, like an iPad game. I still have ideas that I’m not sure how to express in a big game, but those would likely be ideas I could pursue in a small one. You never know what the future holds.
Ramsay: What are you doing now? Are you happy?
Cain: I left Carbine Studios in July 2011, and I decided to take some time off. While I did interview at some game companies—mostly at places that approached me when word of my Carbine departure got out—I was not actively looking for work. Instead, I was thinking about all of the different kinds of development work I had done before, and I was trying to decide which work I liked the most and which I didn’t like. Given that August 2011 marked the thirtieth anniversary of my first game industry job, I thought it was a good time to stop and take stock of my career.
During lunch with Chris Jones, an old friend and colleague from Interplay and Troika and an owner of Obsidian, he mentioned that I seemed happiest when I was not at a big company in a management role. He said I had seemed the most happy when I was programming Fallout 1, and he thought I should consider that kind of job—one where I could take an active hands-on role in the development of a game, but at a small company.
So, I approached a startup in Seattle and offered my services. After the interview, they offered me a job, but there was one catch: the position would not begin until April 2012. When I mentioned this to Chris, he suggested that I spend the balance of my time doing programming work at Obsidian. I came by the Obsidian offices and liked the people I met and the projects I saw, and I started working there on October 11, 2011.
And who knows what may happen next? If I like Obsidian and they like me, I may stay. Or I may join the startup in Seattle. But one thing is clear to me. Going forward, I am going to pick jobs based on how happy they will make me, and not on how much they pay, how much responsibility I receive, or how much they may advance my career. I have done those things, and I wasn’t happier for it. I suppose these are the kind of life lessons that everyone has to learn for themselves at some point. This was my point.
Cain: While Fallout was in production, I was unhappy at how development worked at Interplay. People who didn’t play games, or didn’t even seem to like games, were making decisions about how to market the game, what features it should have, and when it should ship.
Worse, decisions were being made that changed the game and required us to do substantial changes, and these decisions could and should have been made months earlier. For example, the UK office said no children could be harmed in the game, but children had been in the design for years. Another example: Interplay spent a lot of money for an external marketing agency to develop treatments for the box and ad, and they were terrible.
My artists produced better work on their own time, but marketing did not want to use them. However, when Interplay’s president, Brian Fargo, saw their work, he liked what he saw, so the art was used. My role as producer appeared to consist of arguing with people and trying to defend the game from devolving into a lesser product.
In July 1997—Fallout would ship three months later in October—I had decided that I did not want to work on Fallout 2. I submitted to my boss, Feargus Urquhart, a review for my line producer Fred Hatch that recommended he should be promoted to associate producer and assigned Fallout 2. Although the review was not processed, Feargus gave Fred the game to see how he would perform. When the first designs were submitted, I really didn’t like them. Neither did Feargus, nor did Brian Fargo.
Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who were the two artists and designers on Fallout with whom I would later start Troika, didn’t feel any different either. So, Leonard and Jason wrote a different storyline for the game, which Brian liked more, but he told me he’d like to see what I could do. When I asked Feargus about Fred’s promotion—his review was now long overdue—he told me that while he wouldn’t make me do Fallout 2, the promotion wasn’t going to happen, and Fred wouldn’t get the sequel.
Feargus planned to give Fallout 2 to the producer of Descent to Undermountain if I didn’t take it. While I personally liked that producer, I hated Descent. I thought the sequel would suffer under similar direction. I told Feargus that I would do the sequel and began working on a design.
Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I informed Feargus that I was thinking of quitting. I wanted him to know how I was feeling about development and how deeply I had been affected. I was worried that the same problems I had experienced during the development of Fallout would persist during the making of Fallout 2. Feargus said he understood.
When I returned, he asked if I had made a decision. I had not, and so I began work on Fallout 2. I worked out a new design and made an aggressive schedule to get the game out by the end of October 1998. I then started working on the game as lead designer and producer.
But the same problems resurfaced. For example, to save time and money, I had decided to have the same internal artists make the box for Fallout 2. Feargus was upset that I had made such a decision without consulting him, but when I talked to Marketing, they were fine with the idea. But then Sales decided to change the box size and style, which would create problems for making the second box look similar to the first. In a meeting with Sales where Feargus was present, I was told that the decision was made and “there will be no further discussion on it.”
I decided I had enough. Leonard and Jason, who could tell I was unhappy, had told me weeks earlier that they were unwilling to work on the sequel without me. Rather than simply quit, I remembered that Brian had told me years ago, after a programmer had quit under bad circumstances, that he wished people would come and talk to him rather than quit.
I went to Brian in December and told him that I was unhappy and wanted to quit. I decided to be frank and honest, and told him that other people also weren’t happy and might resign with me. He wanted names. I told him about Leonard and Jason. Other people declined to be mentioned.
Throughout December and January, the three of us met with Brian to discuss the problems and see what solutions might be found. We wanted to meet with Brian as a group to prevent any misunderstandings that might arise from separate meetings. In fact, I wanted Feargus there, too, but Brian only included him once toward the end. Brian seemed surprised that I was getting resistance to doing Fallout 2 my way. His attitude was, “You did well on the first game, so just do it again on the second.”
Unfortunately, this meant running to Brian whenever anyone tried to force their own ideas into the game, which didn’t seem like a good working environment. We discussed this problem and raised other issues at these meetings, such as converting our bonus plan to a royalty-based plan. Brian did not like the idea of royalties. As for how to handle creative control, Brian said I could divide the responsibilities with Feargus, so I could handle Marketing and other departments directly, and they would have to effectively treat me as a division director. This seemed unsatisfactory to me, but Feargus seemed very unhappy that his own authority and responsibilities concerning Fallout 2 would be greatly reduced in this plan.
It was unclear how some issues would get resolved, such as budgeting for equipment and maintenance, since I didn’t have a division director’s budget. Brian handwaved these issues, saying that we’d work them out.
At that point, I regretted not abiding my original instinct to walk out and trying to work things out with Brian. In mid-January, I decided to leave the com-pany. I told Feargus, who accepted my resignation and asked me to work until the end of the month. We went to talk to Trish Wright, the executive producer, who was unhappy to see me leave but accepted it. She warned me that Brian might be very upset, but I wanted to tell him that day. I returned to my office and told Leonard and Jason that I had quit, effective at the end of the month. Then I went and told Brian.
As expected, he was not happy. We talked for an hour, but the meeting was cut short because I had a dental appointment. While I was at the dentist, Leonard and Jason also decided to tender their resignations. I didn’t speak to Brian after that day, and I finished out the month with my team.
My team was surprised and unhappy, having heard nothing of my months of meetings with Brian. I met with them to make sure the design for Fallout 2 was up-to-date. And I met with Feargus; my replacement, Eric Demilt, who would produce Fallout 2; and other designers, such as Chris Avellone and Zeb Cook, who would assume my design responsibilities.
I made sure that everyone understood the new design and where all of my documents were located on the local network. Phil Adam, the head of human resources, met with me once, to get my view on why I was leaving, but I otherwise did not interact with Brian or the administration.
On my last day, I packed my personal effects and went to Human Resources to process out. I was redirected to Legal, where I was asked to sign a letter that reminded me of my confidentiality agreement. I learned later that Leonard and Jason were not asked to sign such a letter. And then I went home, wondering what to do, now that I had a good title under my belt but had effectively cut ties with my last company.
Ramsay: When did you approach Leonard and Jason about Troika?
Cain: I talked to Leonard and Jason the day after we quit about their plans. None of us had approached any companies before we quit Interplay. Personally, I was too busy trying to document my plans for Fallout 2 to even think about what to do next. So, we sat down and talked about what we liked about Fallout and what we didn’t like, and one theme became clear: we really wanted to make a fantasy computer role-playing game.
We had avoided the fantasy genre when we made Fallout, and that was a conscious decision to distance ourselves from the large number of competitors already on the shelves, such as the Ultima series, the Might & Magic series, and all of the games based on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). But we felt that we had earned the right to work in that genre, and we had a number of ideas that would make our game stand out.
The desire to mix magic and technology was present from the outset of our talks, so really, you could say that the basis for Arcanum formed very quickly. We wrote down our ideas for technology levels, for the effects of technology on classic fantasy races like elves and orcs, and for the role of magic in such a world. Everything seemed to come together very quickly, and we were pleased with our outline for the game.
Originally, we never planned to make our own company. None of us were businessmen, but we did enjoy working together. We went to several local companies, such as Blizzard and Virgin, but they were more interested in hiring us to work on one of their existing games under development than to work on an original game. After a few weeks, we figured that our game would only be made if we formed our own development company and found a publisher, so we switched tactics and began approaching companies for a contract and not for employment. That’s when we created Troika.
The name came from something that Feargus would call us back when we worked on Fallout. As producer, I would be responsible for signing off on various game assets, such as the manual, the box cover, and any advertisements. However, I am not very artistic, and I am color-blind as well, so I would usually bring Leonard and Jason along with me to check that the art was appropriate on these assets. Feargus started calling us “the Troika,” and after we had left Interplay and thought about making our own company, we liked that phrase enough to use it for our company name.
We incorporated on a suitable date: April 1, 1998. We didn’t get a publishing deal until summer. We worked out of our homes until we moved into offices in October. And that’s when Troika really began.
Ramsay: None of you had experience on the business side of running a studio. Did you find someone to play that role?
Cain: We never did get a business person. In hindsight, that was probably our biggest mistake. We would work on a game until it was finished, then we would scramble to find our next contract. We should have had someone whose full-time job was to secure funding for us, so we could concentrate on making games. Instead, we were always overworked and stressed. We did find a great lawyer who specialized in legal contracts in the game industry, but that only helped after we found a deal.
Ramsay: How did you chart out the future of the company? Did you at least go through the business-planning process?
Cain: We didn’t chart out anything. We tried to get our first contract, and we did. As soon as we had it, we concentrated on nothing else. We focused on that game—designing it, programming it, and producing its art assets. We were developers first and foremost. Running the business was an afterthought—an extra chore that we did between developing games.
Ramsay: What happened next? What was your first challenge?
Cain: Our first big challenge after incorporating was finding a publishing deal. None of us had any contacts in the industry, so we just cold-called places. We went to Activision, Sony, and a few other big publishers, but everyone seemed more interested in hiring us than funding us. Finally, six months after we quit Interplay and four months after forming Troika, when we were feeling the most despondent, we got a call from Sierra that changed everything.
Scott Lynch was a newly promoted vice president of development at Sierra, and he had loved Fallout. Scott was very excited about our ideas for Arcanum, and more importantly, he wanted to get us signed quickly so we could get started on it. He was even willing to make unheard-of—at least to us—concessions in the contract, so that we could get funded quickly. I think the whole negotiation period took less than a month. And we had a great contract! The big challenge now? They wanted a working prototype of the game in 90 days.
Ramsay: Then you began hiring the first employees?
Cain: Ninety days was insane, but we didn’t know it. We were excited to get the contract. We had come off Fallout and Fallout 2 at Black Isle, where we had worked crazy hours. I worked up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three months of Fallout. I figured I could do that again.
The working prototype that Sierra wanted was a sample level from the game. They wanted the player to be able to walk around, cast some spells, and engage in combat. They wanted one or two creatures to fight, a structure of some kind to enter, and some interesting effects. And we decided to do particle effects and real-time shadows. Of course, they also wanted a user interface on top of everything.
Unfortunately, the programming challenge proved to be beyond my abilities in that time frame. Since Sierra was paying us for the prototype, we used some of that money to hire another programmer, and the two of us worked crazy hours along with Leonard and Jason to get that prototype done. We started from nothing—no code base, no art, nothing. And we managed to make a really good prototype.
Ramsay: What was the size of your team during prototype development? How large did the Arcanum team eventually grow?
Cain: There were just the four of us: we three founders and one additional programmer. When we finished the prototype and Sierra accepted it, we rented office space in Irvine and were joined by three more people. Over the next few months, we hired five more, for a total of twelve people. I am still amazed to this day that we developed Arcanum with only twelve people. For three years, we worked long days—between ten to fourteen hours per day—and most weekends, usually Saturday and sometimes Sunday, too. This is what you can do when you are young, idealistic, and optimistic.
Ramsay: There were no concerns about crunch, quality of life, and the impact on productivity? How did you reward employees for performance?
Cain: When we hired everyone, we told them we wanted to keep the company small and lean. While we knew there would be long hours, everyone would have opportunities to work in many different areas of the game and have ownership of those areas. That’s why the credits for Arcanum simply state our names and not any titles. All of us made Arcanum. We blurred the lines between programmers, artists, and designers—hence the name of our company. One person would create animations and write dialogue, while another would implement combat and design quests. We were kind of like communists, which made our company name even more appropriate.
In that communist vein, we also decided to pay everyone the same salary, so we hired only senior, experienced people. If the game brought in any money, we would split the amount 50/50. Half would go to the company and funding our next game. The other half would be split evenly among us. At the end of the project, that’s exactly what we did.
Ramsay: You were working long hours, with undifferentiated roles, hiring only experienced people, and paying employees without concern for merit. That doesn’t sound like a sustainable model.
Cain: We couldn’t keep working at this pace or with this flat hierarchy. It was difficult to plan a schedule when everyone had an equal say in all matters, and we felt that we needed to structure our team better.
After Arcanum shipped, we rearranged ourselves into a hierarchy with leads, seniors, and staff members. We planned our design work carefully, trying to avoid the crushingly long hours we had endured for the last three years. We started working on a Lord of the Rings game using the Arcanum engine but with a completely different art style. We worked with Sierra and the Tolkien estate, and we created a really fascinating storyline for the player, which paralleled the original fellowship storyline. But Sierra pulled the development into one of their internal teams, which was extremely disappointing. Then out of the blue, we ended up being courted by two different publishers, and both of them had offers to work on licensed games.
We accepted both offers and split into two groups. One group worked on a D&D game for Atari, while another began work on a White Wolf Vampire game for Activision. I was in charge of the first group, while Leonard and Jason headed up the second.
Ramsay: These games were The Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, right? Were you able to reuse the Arcanum engine?
Cain: Yes, we used a heavily modified Arcanum engine for Temple. We were lucky that we had reserved the rights to the engine in our contract with Sierra, because they retained the rights to the property. The new engine used 3D models for the characters instead of 2D sprites, and the background art contained masks to let the 3D characters pass behind the 2D background images.
Of course, we converted all of the system mechanics to D&D version 3, and then 16 months into the project, we converted the mechanics to 3.5. I am very proud of the game for being completed in 20 months. It may not be my finest work, but it was done quickly and is incredibly feature-rich for such a fast project.
On the other hand, Vampire was done using Valve’s Source engine. That’s the same engine used for Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and many other games. In fact, we were the first external developer to make a game with Source. We actually finished Vampire before Half-Life 2, but we could not release our game before Valve released their game.
Ramsay: When you were negotiating with Sierra, did you try to obtain the rights to Arcanum? Why did you keep the rights to the technology instead? Would you recommend asking for technology rights to other developers?
Cain: We tried to keep the rights to Arcanum, but Sierra was investing 100% of the capital. They really wouldn’t budge on this issue. So, we asked for the rights to keep all technology involved in its development, including all tools and the engine itself. Sierra agreed, which was a delightful surprise.
I advise startups to ask for whatever they want. The worst a publisher can do is say no, and they probably will, if they are providing the majority of the funding. But sometimes they will give you what you want. We were able to make Temple so quickly because we already had an engine ready to use.
Ramsay: Temple had a very short development cycle, and the mechanics were revised during the last stretch. What went right? What suffered? If you had more time, how would the game have been different?
Cain: The original schedule for Temple was 18 months, which was and is unthinkable for a full-featured role-playing game. I tried to convince Atari that we needed more time. When I failed, I reduced the scope of the project and cut several classes from the design, including the druid and the bard, both of which had many specialized rules for their abilities. Atari asked for those classes to be restored, implying that the game contract depended on it, so I added them back. But very little manpower was available for design. I hoped that by picking a classic module for the base design that I would save many hours of design time, but we could have probably made a better product in that time frame by developing our own game world.
What suffered? Well, we had very little time to write dialogue, or develop quest lines, or balance treasure amounts. Our tight schedule left only two people, Tom Decker and myself, any time to do these tasks. I was also the producer, and Tom was in charge of localization. We had too many chores and not enough time to do them. It certainly didn’t help that, in the middle of development, Wizards of the Coast published the D&D 3.5 core rules revisions. We had a difficult choice: launch the game with out-of-date mechanics or change those mechanics in the face of an already tight deadline. I asked Atari for more time, specifically for three months. I told them that this was an issue they should have foreseen. Did they not know about the revisions? But they didn’t want to budge. Finally, they gave us an extra two months, bringing us up to twenty months.
In that time frame, we did a great job on the combat system, which was a masterful interpretation of the D&D rules married with an intuitive interface. Even people who did not play D&D could quickly grasp basic combat, and many of the more advanced combat feats were supported as well. I think it helped us immensely that many of our programming staff were D&D fans, and they already knew the rules very well.
In hindsight, given a longer schedule, we would have made our own IP instead of using The Temple of Elemental Evil, and I believe that world would have had the rich characters and storylines that people had come to expect from Troika. And, of course, the game would have shipped with fewer bugs and design issues than it did. But that is starting to sound like the moral of the Troika story: if we only had more time.
Ramsay: Troika also had some trouble with release timing. How did Valve’s embargo on Vampire impact the company?
Cain: Well, the embargo caused several problems. First, while the game was held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We’d have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn’t let that happen. They picked a version as the gold master for duplication, and then they held that version close until the ship date. We fixed some bugs, but they didn’t want to pass new builds to quality assurance.
Second, while our game was being held, Valve continued to make improvements to the Source engine—improvements we couldn’t add to our game. It was frustrating to play Half-Life 2 and see advancements in physics, modeling, facial animation, and other features that our game did not have.
Finally, the embargo really demoralized the team. They had finished a game that couldn’t be shipped, or changed, or talked about. And when Vampire was shipped, the game was compared unfavorably to the only other Source game on the market. Needless to say, we lost some good people during that time. They quit in frustration and went elsewhere.
Ramsay: Even if there was a need for the title to be published before Half-Life 2, Valve made that impossible. Why did Activision freeze the project?
Cain: Just to be clear, I came over to the Vampire team after the first two years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never interacted with Activision during development.
With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three years. While that’s not a long time for a role-playing game—Fallout had taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made almost a decade earlier—Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.
Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of these problems?
Cain: Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character.
We were also working on smoothing out the walking animations of characters during in-game cinematic sequences. The embargo occurred during the middle of this process, which left a great many characters skating or stuttering during those sequences. And the warrens near the end of the game were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No balancing or dialogue was added at all.
I don’t have to restate how demoralizing these issues were to the team. All of these problems were easily solvable with more time, but that time was not available.
Ramsay: Was there any ill will toward Valve?
Cain: No, we weren’t really angry with Valve. They made their deal with Activision, and part of that deal was that any Source-based game had to be shipped after their Half-Life 2. Valve had the luxury of pushing out their ship date repeatedly—and they did—to ensure that their game was great. We were hoping for the same luxury, but Activision didn’t grant it.
Now Activision, on the other hand, did get a bit of our ire. When we discovered that we could not ship before Valve, we never imagined that Activision would ship Vampire on the same day as Half-Life 2. For several reasons, a much better idea would have been to ship Vampire a couple of months later. It would have given us time to polish our game with a stable engine. It would have given the consumer something else to buy that used the Source engine after Half-Life 2. And a later release would also not have put us in direct competition for consumer dollars during our important first few weeks on store shelves, because we all knew that consumers were going to choose Half-Life 2 over Vampire. And, really, was the cost of a few more months of development really that much more than the years we had already spent on the game? No, I may not be a businessman, but that seemed like a bad choice on Activision’s part.
Ramsay: Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Did Leonard or Jason make these arguments to Activision?
Cain: Leonard did a lot of the interacting with Activision, and he did suggest this course of action many times. As far as I knew, Activision either ignored the suggestion or complained about how much time Vampire had already taken. They really did not want to put any more money into the game than they absolutely had to, but at the same time, they demanded triple-A quality. It was quite schizophrenic.
Ramsay: In the end, this ordeal brought about the collapse of Troika? What happened after Vampire shipped?
Cain: Leonard, Jason, and I went looking for a new contract even before Vampire shipped, since we were done a few months before. Leonard pursued Fallout 3, which ultimately went to Bethesda, who outbid us. I landed us a contract with the Department of Defense to modify Temple to make it a training ground for military artificial intelligence. The idea of military AI learning in a Dungeons & Dragons world amused me to no end. But that contract only covered three people for about six months. After a few months of searching, we ended up laying off half of the employees, with severance pay, so we could keep the office open.
We actually had the opportunity to get contracts for several different games, but none of them were role-playing games, and none of them were games that I had any interest in playing. Leonard wanted to take them to tide us over, but I didn’t want to do that. I figured, why should we have a company if we were not making the games we wanted to make?
I didn’t particularly enjoy running a business, and Leonard and Jason didn’t either, so we decided to shut down Troika while we were still in the black. We could pay our remaining employees severance and insurance, so they could find other employment, and we kept the office open for a month to make their transitions easier. In fact, we kept Troika going as a business for six months, with me running it from my house, so employees could file for insurance under COBRA, which is easy and fairly automatic. If we had closed, they would have had to apply for HIPPA, which is much more complicated. It was the best we could do.
In the end, Vampire shipped in November 2004. We closed the office in February. And Troika officially ceased to be a company in September 2005.
Ramsay: Looking back, do you think you should have pursued contracts for the games you didn’t want to do? In several months to a year, there might have been more attractive opportunities.
Cain: Oh, I think I will always wonder about that, but honestly, I have no regrets. Troika was a wonderful experience while it lasted, but I am not a businessman. I did not want to live a life of pursuing one contract after another, of negotiating with publishers, or of dealing with employees and landlords. I got into this business to make games, and I am getting to do that more as someone else’s employee than as a company owner.
Ramsay: Would you say that Troika was your first and last venture?
Cain: I will never say never, but yes, it’s very likely that I will never start my own company again. Owning your own company is something that many people dream about, but I’ve been there and done that. It’s just not for me. Now with that said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of making a game on my own, smaller in scope than my previous games and something designed for a particular platform, like an iPad game. I still have ideas that I’m not sure how to express in a big game, but those would likely be ideas I could pursue in a small one. You never know what the future holds.
Ramsay: What are you doing now? Are you happy?
Cain: I left Carbine Studios in July 2011, and I decided to take some time off. While I did interview at some game companies—mostly at places that approached me when word of my Carbine departure got out—I was not actively looking for work. Instead, I was thinking about all of the different kinds of development work I had done before, and I was trying to decide which work I liked the most and which I didn’t like. Given that August 2011 marked the thirtieth anniversary of my first game industry job, I thought it was a good time to stop and take stock of my career.
During lunch with Chris Jones, an old friend and colleague from Interplay and Troika and an owner of Obsidian, he mentioned that I seemed happiest when I was not at a big company in a management role. He said I had seemed the most happy when I was programming Fallout 1, and he thought I should consider that kind of job—one where I could take an active hands-on role in the development of a game, but at a small company.
So, I approached a startup in Seattle and offered my services. After the interview, they offered me a job, but there was one catch: the position would not begin until April 2012. When I mentioned this to Chris, he suggested that I spend the balance of my time doing programming work at Obsidian. I came by the Obsidian offices and liked the people I met and the projects I saw, and I started working there on October 11, 2011.
And who knows what may happen next? If I like Obsidian and they like me, I may stay. Or I may join the startup in Seattle. But one thing is clear to me. Going forward, I am going to pick jobs based on how happy they will make me, and not on how much they pay, how much responsibility I receive, or how much they may advance my career. I have done those things, and I wasn’t happier for it. I suppose these are the kind of life lessons that everyone has to learn for themselves at some point. This was my point.
Interview #2 DGC Ep 033: Interview with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky (podcast interview with Boyarsky and Cain)
Interview #3
RPG Codex Retrospective Interview: Tim Cain on Fallout, Troika and RPG Design
Interview #4
Matt Chat 66: Tim Cain interview
Interview #5
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ime-travel-sentient-dinosaurs-fantasy-planets
An early story concept for the first game in the hugely popular Fallout series saw you zipping back and forth in time, traveling through space and battling sentient dinosaurs, creator Tim Cain has revealed.
Speaking at a post-mortem panel at GDC in San Francisco today, Cain explained that the game's story morphed a number of times before its eventual post-apocalyptic setting was settled upon.
At first, it was going to be a traditional Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game.
"A lot of people who came on board said we could do something that's better than D&D - let's put our own twist on that," he recalled.
"We quickly threw that out as there were so many other fantasy games being developed. This is the one choice we made that saved us from being canceled."
Then came something rather more ambitious.
"Our second idea was epic. You started in the modern world, you were thrown back in time, you killed the monkey that would evolve into modern humans, you went through space, you went to the future which was ruled by dinosaurs, you were then exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back through the timeline, and then you came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend.
"It's weird even hearing myself talking about it now, but we were really going to go with this. One of the other producers kind of slapped me and said 'there's no way you're ever going to get this story made. You can work on it for years and nobody is ever going to do it'.
Sure enough, Cain and his team scrapped the idea. However, they held on to the extra-terrestrial theme for their next pass. That concept saw aliens invade earth and conquer all but one its cities. The game's hero would then venture out of this safe zone to fight back.
"This is what morphed into Fallout - the idea of a vault that you left and went out into the wasteland," said Cain.
However, getting the game finished and onto shelves proved a very challenging process, with the title nearly axed on a number of separate occasions.
Its first brush with cancellation arose when publisher Interplay picked up the Forgotten Realms and Planescape D&D licenses. Some at the company thought that a new RPG IP might detract from sales of those titles. However, Cain "begged" boss Brian Fargo not to pull the plug and Interplay duly let it live.
It had another close call when Steve Jackson's GURP role playing brand, which Fallout was initially tied into, decided the game was too violent and didn't approve of the art style.
"It was too late to change anything," explained Cain. "I figured we were going to be canceled."
But management gave Cain a last minute reprieve.
"I was asked to write a new combat system. We had a week to design it and a week to code it. If we could do that we wouldn't be canceled. I'm not exactly sure how we did it. I know we drank a lot of soda, we were there all the time, I know we smelled bad too, but we did it."
There was one more shaky moment just before launch. European ratings boards refused to classify the game for release as it allowed the player to kill children.
"We allowed it. We just said it's in the game. If you shoot them it's a huge penalty to karma. You're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, there are people that will shoot you on sight. We thought people can decide what they want to do.
"But Europe said no. They wouldn't even sell the game. We didn't have time to redo the quests so we just deleted kids off the disc [for the European release]. The story references children but you never actually see any."
Cain also discussed the struggles the team had coming up with a name for the game. It was originally going to be titled Vault13 but Interplay's marketing team rejected it as it "didn't give any sense of what the game was about."
"They suggested things like Aftermath, Survivor and the wonderfully generic Post Nuclear Adventure," recalled Cain.
"What eventually happened was Brian Fargo took the game home and played it over the weekend. He came back and put the CD on my desk and said 'you should call it Fallout'. It was a brilliant name - it really captured the essence of the game."
And the rest is history. The game launched on PC in 1997 to huge critical and commercial success and a franchise was born.
Cain now works as a senior programmer at Obsidian - the developer behind last year's Fallout: New Vegas.
Speaking at a post-mortem panel at GDC in San Francisco today, Cain explained that the game's story morphed a number of times before its eventual post-apocalyptic setting was settled upon.
At first, it was going to be a traditional Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game.
"A lot of people who came on board said we could do something that's better than D&D - let's put our own twist on that," he recalled.
"We quickly threw that out as there were so many other fantasy games being developed. This is the one choice we made that saved us from being canceled."
Then came something rather more ambitious.
"Our second idea was epic. You started in the modern world, you were thrown back in time, you killed the monkey that would evolve into modern humans, you went through space, you went to the future which was ruled by dinosaurs, you were then exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back through the timeline, and then you came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend.
"It's weird even hearing myself talking about it now, but we were really going to go with this. One of the other producers kind of slapped me and said 'there's no way you're ever going to get this story made. You can work on it for years and nobody is ever going to do it'.
Sure enough, Cain and his team scrapped the idea. However, they held on to the extra-terrestrial theme for their next pass. That concept saw aliens invade earth and conquer all but one its cities. The game's hero would then venture out of this safe zone to fight back.
"This is what morphed into Fallout - the idea of a vault that you left and went out into the wasteland," said Cain.
However, getting the game finished and onto shelves proved a very challenging process, with the title nearly axed on a number of separate occasions.
Its first brush with cancellation arose when publisher Interplay picked up the Forgotten Realms and Planescape D&D licenses. Some at the company thought that a new RPG IP might detract from sales of those titles. However, Cain "begged" boss Brian Fargo not to pull the plug and Interplay duly let it live.
It had another close call when Steve Jackson's GURP role playing brand, which Fallout was initially tied into, decided the game was too violent and didn't approve of the art style.
"It was too late to change anything," explained Cain. "I figured we were going to be canceled."
But management gave Cain a last minute reprieve.
"I was asked to write a new combat system. We had a week to design it and a week to code it. If we could do that we wouldn't be canceled. I'm not exactly sure how we did it. I know we drank a lot of soda, we were there all the time, I know we smelled bad too, but we did it."
There was one more shaky moment just before launch. European ratings boards refused to classify the game for release as it allowed the player to kill children.
"We allowed it. We just said it's in the game. If you shoot them it's a huge penalty to karma. You're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, there are people that will shoot you on sight. We thought people can decide what they want to do.
"But Europe said no. They wouldn't even sell the game. We didn't have time to redo the quests so we just deleted kids off the disc [for the European release]. The story references children but you never actually see any."
Cain also discussed the struggles the team had coming up with a name for the game. It was originally going to be titled Vault13 but Interplay's marketing team rejected it as it "didn't give any sense of what the game was about."
"They suggested things like Aftermath, Survivor and the wonderfully generic Post Nuclear Adventure," recalled Cain.
"What eventually happened was Brian Fargo took the game home and played it over the weekend. He came back and put the CD on my desk and said 'you should call it Fallout'. It was a brilliant name - it really captured the essence of the game."
And the rest is history. The game launched on PC in 1997 to huge critical and commercial success and a franchise was born.
Cain now works as a senior programmer at Obsidian - the developer behind last year's Fallout: New Vegas.
Interview #6
Presentation at GDC in 2012:
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But obviously the overall "Fallout" fan base has grown and changed with the release of Fallout 3. A lot of the people involved with (especially Bethesda's) Fallout fan communities only have experience with Fallout 3. They don't know anything about NCR or Myron or playing chess with ZAX in the Glow or the ominous bell music in the Cathedral.
I like this guy, despite the fact that he's clearly an idiot with all the mobile gaming talk.
