Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[ciox]

Damn, he's dropped a bomb with the last one.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Very few people know the full details about this, nobody at Bethesda knows about it, most of the Fallout team either doesn't know it or heard it third hand and probably forgot the details. Cain took many notes, some things missing, he will get into that.
Back in 1995, development had Fallout had been going for about two years, marketing had hired an external advertising company to come up with the Fallout logo, the type font to use, and the box cover. When they got them, Cain went "Huh." They were pretty plain, nothing really Fallout about it, could have been any post apocalypse game. Wished he remembered the name of the advertising company. They didn't like it, so Leonard decides he will make a new one. That said, Leonard looked back at the company's previous work and really kind of liked the logo, just not how the cover used it. Made what would be Fallout's final cover.
Marketing did not like that cover, there was a meeting with someone Cain will not name (He remembers who it was, but certain elements of the channel's audience seem to shame anyone he names), He said they loved what Leonard did, but they would not be using it. Cain asked why, the marketing individual had several reasons, but what Cain remembers most is that they emphasized the importance of a face on the cover. Cain countered that the Power Armor guy was very distinctive , but Marketing insisted the face had to be visible. Keep in mind, there was no visible face on the box the advertising company made. He pointed that out, the marketing guy just said wellll there are rules. He kept talking, Cain wasn't looking at him, and was staring at something on a shelf behind the gentleman's desk. The other guy eventually turned to see what Cain was looking at: A copy of Interplay's #1 Best selling game of 1995, Descent (Picture of it at 4:08 in case you don't know what it looks like.) You may notice something about that cover, that there is no face on it. The other person had spent 10 minutes talking about the importance of a face and he could not approve Leonard's work because of it while the #1 selling game was just that. Cain said he didn't understand, and the other guy would say the exception proves the rule. First time someone told Cain that, but not the last time. Would come back in Fallout 2 when the design team was doing something Cain thought was pretty trope-y and they responded yeah but sometimes cliches work.
Cain is color blind, doesn't have much artistic sense, didn't like what the ad company did, did like Leonard's, Leonard cared a lot about it, so he decided to make an issue about it. He refused to sign off on the ad company's art. There was a room just for producers and other higher level people to sign off on stuff, he did put Leonard's art in there and signed off on it. Other people signed off on it, so it became the Fallout box cover.
Two years later, Cain is working on Fallout 2 despite agreeing Cain wouldn't do it. He is in charge of it, Leonard and Jason are handling the art. Leonard had a great idea for a cover that not only tied into the first box but connected to the tribal backstory of the second game (6:38 on the video and on the thumbnail.) Special thanks to reddit user FoxTrotNiner for cleaning up the art. This image became a loading screen in Fallout 2, obviously they did not use it for the cover. In a meeting, Cain discovered what would become the Fallout 2 cover we know was now the cover and Leonard's work would not be used. Cain protested he wanted the art his artists put together, and pointed out Leonard's art had that vital face that was theoretically needed for a cover and the company's box art didn't. The person on the other side was a new marketing individual, first she denied any knowledge on the idea that a face was important in a cover, then said that they had already decided on the new art, it was done, there would be no need for further discussion. People like to focus on several reasons Cain left Interplay, this was one of them. Someone with no experience with Fallout made a decision Cain didn't like, an important decision, without any feedback from him and completely ignored his complaints. This was not what Cain had spent years crunching for.
First, Cain thinks Leonard's would have been better, but it wasn't that Cain felt super strongly about that, but when you become a game director that means you have to fight fights that are not necessarily yours. Someone on your team feels strongly about something, you agree with that person, even if you personally don't think it's important, it is important to them, so you go to the mat for them. Cain is a colorblind programmer, he doesn't have much of a dog in artistic fights, but he fought for the artists.
Apparently there were other reasons to go for the Enclave box art, they had changed the box shape. He wasn't sure if the new one had a flap or not, but the first fallout box was more horizontal while the new one was vertical (Apparently this was how shelving worked in game stores.) They could have changed the tribal cover to fit that very easily, Leonard said he could have gone and done the change instantly as it was just a digital image. But nope, it had already been decided. Odd thing for Interplay to double down on, and gave Cain a bad feeling about the shape of things to come, stupid arguments with people who had nothing to do with creating a thing but suddenly want to be a big part of it.
If you ever make an IP, unless you own it, you will lose control of it, so brace yourself for being overridden like this.

 

[Roguey]

Eh, I always thought Advanced Power Armor guy looked fine. I can understand having strong feelings about being left out of the decision-making process, but I don't see a big difference in quality between the two covers.

 

[rubinstein]

i hate soulless marketing golems with their graphs and statistical models so much its unreal

 

[deuxhero]

I think it was almost 2 decades ago that all game publishers simultaneously admitted to the public "Everyone goes into the shop knowing what they're buying already. Box art doesn't really matter. In-fact we should make the cases as small as possible so the store can stock more and we have lower shipping costs"

 

[luj1]

Fallout 1 technically should have been Wasteland 2

 

[Alienman]

external advertising company

The more I hear... What did they actually develop themself? I'm starting to think just the idea of apocalypse was it, everything else was a fluke, or someone else doing it. Kinda don't want to hear more development stories. He is killing the "magic".

 

[ciox]

Eh, I always thought Advanced Power Armor guy looked fine. I can understand having strong feelings about being left out of the decision-making process, but I don't see a big difference in quality between the two covers.

Sure, you could also make the argument that his preferred cover would be too similar to the cover of the first Fallout, featuring the same power armor twice.

I guess Tim saw it as another symbol of Fallout's future as a cash cow, detached from the efforts of the original dev team. I get his position but I can't help but feel that him leaving damaged Fallout, something similar to what happened when Ridley Scott and James Cameron both took a step back from Alien during the 90s, allegedly as a reaction to execs becoming interested in combining the Alien and Predator franchises. No one knows what could or would have happened, but you can't shake the feeling.

 

[Sigourn]

I always loved the tribal artwork and agree it would have been a much better cover.

 

[__scribbles__]

I have mentioned writing my memoir, and I talk about another book I wrote about my family history. I use this story as a way to encourage viewers to find time for the things they want to do.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Wrote a second book in addition to his unpublished memoirs, actually made prints of this one and sent it to a bunch of people.
Moved to California in 1987, bought a house in 1995, soon after that his mom started sending him family photos, knew he was interested in family history and he was already doing primitive genealogical research. Moderate climate, only occasionally super hot, never really cold, constant temperature and humidity compared to other places, good place to store photos. Didn't recognize a lot of people in the photos, his mother told him who she knew, there were other ones she didn't know. Took as many notes as he could
Mother passed away in 2013, at this point Cain had 2000 photos, felt bad that he had all of these photos. Cain's husband bought him a scanner that let you put in multiple photos at once and scan them in as multiple jpgs. Took a while, but got all the images into a cloud repository and sent them to his siblings and other relatives so they could access them.
A few years later, Cain did 23AndAme, back when they did your genealogical history and medical history for a little vial at $99. Discovered he was British and Irish (Knew that), German (Sort of knew), French (Did not know), Scandinavian (Did not know), and Native American (Had never heard of that from anyone in his family.)
Lots of census records you can look at, other people did research you can connect with. Quickly found his great great grandfather was a Swede called Fensom, at Ellis Island they changed his name to Swanson. Married a woman named Mrytle and that side of the family is figured out. Found the German line, found the French line (Malote), found his last name comes from Ireland. No royalty, as far as Cain goes back it's just farmers. Mostly of his family went to Ohio except for a few that went to Pennsylvania. Found he was descended from the first baby born after the Mayflower landed in Provincetown (Cain vacationed and got married there), realized a few years later he was a few hundred yards away from where his great- by-nine's grandfather Peregine White was born. Searched and searched, but he can't actually find a Native American ancestor. Apparently such marriages were not recorded as Native American for a long period, may have found him/her and just not realized it.
Now knows a lot of the people in those pictures. The oldest photo he has is of his great great grandfather who fought for the Union and was probably the source of the current spelling of his name, That man's father or grandfather came from Cork Ireland with the spelling k a i n and at some point presumably to align with the biblical spelling changed to c a i n. That is the oldest photo, but the oldest person Cain has a photo for is great great great grandmother on his father's side.
All copies of the book except for one have been sent out, his nephew asked for a copy and Cain had to send him the pdf.
Some people asked if Cain has non-game related hobbies, and genealogy is one of them. Cain did all of the research, and the writing in the book, everything he could find out about the relatives. Pictures of their farms, pics from Google Street View of what the place they lived at look like now. Found some sketches of people who lived before photos were possible.
All of this work was done in 2018 while he was working on Outer Worlds, Cain would spend all day in the office and then go home and work on the book.
If you want to do something, you will find the time for it. That book is proof, he made time for that even while working on a new game in an unfamiliar engine. Working on a third book, the making of Fallout, trying to put together the definitive timeline, will do a video of it if he can (Presumably this is the video he mentioned releasing tomorrow.)

 

[toro]

I have mentioned writing my memoir, and I talk about another book I wrote about my family history. I use this story as a way to encourage viewers to find time for the things they want to do.

spoiler alert: his bloodline ends with a childless faggot

 

[NecroLord]

Tim's got not brothers/sisters?

 

[Redshirt #42]

I think he mentioned in at least a couple of videos that he had an older sister. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but she was supposed to learn programming for some subject at school, which is how Tim first learned about it, and he was way better at it than her.

 

[NecroLord]

I think he mentioned in at least a couple of videos that he had an older sister. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but she was supposed to learn programming for some subject at school, which is how Tim first learned about it, and he was way better at it than her.

"He had"
She is dead?

 

[Redshirt #42]

Maybe he's got a brother now instead, I didn't want to assume anything.

 

[Old Hans]

I think he mentioned in at least a couple of videos that he had an older sister. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but she was supposed to learn programming for some subject at school, which is how Tim first learned about it, and he was way better at it than her.

"He had"
She is dead?

it's pretty obvious Tim murdered her, because she was actually the better programmer

 

[StrongBelwas]

Put together from about five years of notes.
1991, started making computer tools for GURPS, did them for fun. Send the Star System Generator to Steve Jackson Games and they let him use the license to release, can maybe still find it somewhere if you look.
Middle of 1993, Rags to Riches just shipped, after it shipped Cain was assigned to different things here and there, worked on some installers, worked on Stonekeep and a few other games, but was also working on engines. Voxel engine, 3d engine, and an isometric 2d sprite engine.
Early 94, Interplay announced at a company meeting they were looking for a tabletop RPG to license, an excited Cain suggests GURPS, believes the weekly sessions he was having helped push the idea, the only other suggestion he heard was licensing Earthdawn.
Already had a way of getting hold of Steve Jackson games, so he mailed them.
Early March of 1994, Steve Jackson visited the studio in person and was shown an early version of the game, basically the isometric 2D engine and GURPs character creator. Went to lunch at Club 33 (Would later take the fallout team there when they shipped) and sat down and played Illuminati, the card game. Was interesting because at one point Steve Jackson and Floyd Grub (An Interplay employee) got into a rules argument and Floyd was right.
March 28th, 1994, Cain sent Steve all of the recent Interplay titles. Not sure exactly when the contract was signed, that is all above his paygrade. Next note he has is June 13th, 1994. Tom Decker, Chris Taylor, and Cain respond to John M Ford's design for a non linear time travelling GURPS roleplaying game. Doesn't have notes for that, but it was apparently quite whacky. Forgets why they didn't go for it, but it was a little early, they hadn't figured out their genre yet.
In August 24th, 1994, made the first wishlist for the project. Wanted Chris Taylor and Scott Campbell as designers, wanted Jason Taylor to do scripts and design implementation, Jesse Reynolds as an extra programmer, and for lead artist he wrote Spencer Kipe. Hadn't worked with him, but he was on their GURPS session, he played the overweight magic user that fled fights and let the fire elemental fight. Doesn't know what happened to that, because he didn't have a team yet.
September 9th, 1994, the art list is all generic fantasy. No setting picked yet, his list has stuff like crossbows, medieval armor, generic forest and desert environments.
Fall of 1994, wanted to open the game development, but wasn't allowed to, so that is when he invited people to an empty conference room to have pizza. Surprised at how few people came by, but in hindsight he got highly motivated people because they were willing to come on their own time.
At the second meeting, they elaborated on the crazy time travel setting with dinosaurs and wizards and aliens. Some people liked it, but it was really complicated, so they cut it back to an alien invasion plot where future humans were hiding in shelters. At this point talked to Scott Campbell because Cain had a dream about vaults in an apocalyptic world. Really liked the apocalypse idea, not so much the aliens, so they ditched the alien invasion plot and turned it into pure post apocalypse. Vaults were useful because the player's knowledge of the situation would be the same as the characters.
December 8th 1994 was the first mention of Junktown. Jason Taylor and Jason Anderson were officially assigned to the team. Tom Decker was removed as he had so many projects that Allan Pavish (Executive Producer) declared he simply didn't have time for it. Cain Estimates Tom had about 22-24 different product SKUs he was working on. Cain was a producer now, extra responsibilities, no extra pay. Between Cain and the two Jasons they put together some prototype levels. Combat, taking items from containers. One of those prototypes is on Fallout's CD ROM, video from someone else's channel at 6:55. Prototype, but you can see the sprite engine.
January 2nd, 1995, Cain comes up with the original idea for the Fallout story. On May 22nd 1995, the VP of Development Alan Pavish said he wanted voice actors in the game and wanted a feasibility analysis from Cain.
June 12th 95, the project was now official and had assigned team members, Fargo told Cain he had to regularly come to the offsite producer meetings and produce a vision statement. Cain made several, all of which Fargo hated, culminating in Chris Taylor writing one in January of 1996.
June 21st 1995, confirmed the game would have voice actors.
8:04, picture of everyone assigned to the project at mid 1995. Brian Freyermuth, Leonard Boyarsky, Jesse Reynolds, Tim Cain, Jason Taylor, Scott Campbell, Jason Anderson, Micheal Dean, and Fred Hatch.
August 2nd, decision was made by people above Cain that the game would be for Windows 95. Has a little note saying Steve Jackson Games was not happy about that. Cain pointed out that because he writing it all for GNW, could keep the DOS one as an extra SKU and it wouldn't be too much work (It was a bit more work.)
August 16th, Jesse Reynolds and Cain were switched to Stonekeep to help it ship, lost some time but that was when Scott Rodenheizer joined the team to do the clay heads.
August 30th, Chris Jones begins the Windows 95 port of GNW, did it in about 3 weeks. Enabled a playable version of the game in Windows 95 instantly and a finished one within six months.
September 6th, Scott Campbell gives his two weeks notice. Starts negotiating to get Chris Taylor as soon as Stonekeep ships.
September 3rd, moves from Fitch building to a temporary place at Alton, and then a final place at Von Carmen. The team was Leonard Boyarsky, Micheal Dean, Jason Anderson, Tim Cain, Fred Hatch, Jason Taylor, Jesse Reynolds, Chris Jones, Brian Freyermuth, and Arlene Summers, a 2d artist, did a lot of button sprites.
October 11th, 1995, Helena Wickberg joins the team to make it 11. Marc O'Green was listed as Cain's supervisor, not Feargus. Feargus was still a producer at that point. GURPS was not part of of his D&D division, so Cain was supervised separately.
November 13th 1995, made a Fallout demo just for internal play. Not the demo they released in April 1997. Alan Pavish thought it ran too slow, Fargo loved it. Was particularly fond of the death animations. Set proposed ship date to be November 1996, obviously did not make that.
January 1996, Cain bought a pet emperor scorpion he named Spud and gifted to the team as a mascot. Lived in Fred Hatch's office and dined on crickets caught around Cain's house or the yard. May have been the inspiration for the Radscorpions.
January 29th, Scott Everts and Nicholas Kesting join the team.
February 1996, Cain gave the talk on how to manage a team effectively at an offsite producer meeting.
January 13th 1996, they slip the ship date to February 13th 1997 (They wouldn't make that one earlier.) They had to redo all the estimates to do 3D artwork, they underestimated the effort, Leonard tried to make up for it by working weekends but it wasn't enough. Also started the GURPS-Mac Fallout, there weren't any current plans but Bill Dugan wanted to hire a programmer for it. Cain told him as long as someone was hired before April 1996 it should be doable.
March 26, Mark Morgan is hired for ambient music. Excellent hire.
May 10th 1996, sometime between this and October 1995 Marc O'Green was removed as director and Feargus was the new director. Mac version approved, but still no programmer. Chris DeSalvo, on his own time over the weekend made a mac version of GNW so they at least had a version that worked.
Made an interactive E3 demo that could also be self played. Two maps. showed off most of the features. mini adventure where the player was asked to kill some radscoprions for items in a cave.
July 25th 1996, they made an intro movie. Modeled and rendering began, tried to get rights to I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, didn't get them. Fred Hatch looked into the legal rights. Planned to begin recording in a few weeks, brought in Mark O'Green to rewrite the spoken dialogue. Written dialogue could be cool but sound weird spoken, he rewrote it to sound a lot better when read out. Cain wrote to himself that the design and implementation of maps is going slower than anticipated.
Built a demo for ECTS, a conference at the time. Prepared for editor's day, had many delays for that. Cain wrote to marketing that he understood the need for them, but they had to be scheduled from the start, they could not keep throwing requests for demos at him (They kept throwing requests for demos at him.)
Cain wrote that not only are the tasks for the game becoming more complicated with more team communication needed, but that his own coding time was dropping to about 60% of the time during the week. Was trying to make up for it by going in at the weekend but it kept dropping.
Team photo at 14:30, Around August 1996.
August 1st 1996, Fred was still working on getting the rights for I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, but it didn't seem possible without extensive legal wrangling and royalty payments. Search for other songs began, they really liked Maybe. Believes Gary Platner found that one.
August 11th, Fred and Cain met with Jaime Thomason to do voice directing. He could access incredible voice talent, Cain wrote down being impressed at how professional he was and the top name people he could bring in. Cain submitted a budget, it was approved.
Made a non-interactive movie demo for CGW's anniversary CDROM, it holds GURPS Fallout up as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Full credit to Fred Hatch for putting that together fast, did it all by himself with the rough editing software of the time.
September 11th, 1996, voice recording began. Chris Taylor and Fred Hatch handled most of that, attended every session, but Cain went up one time to watch David Warner. In that same week, got a lot of interface into Starfleet Academy's sound code, which was a trade with John Price for getting GNW to run Starfleet with. Now Fallout had sound. Finally got a programmer for the Mac version of Fallout, Tim Hume, Cain went to graduate school with him, now works at Obsidian. Cleaning up the Mac GNW code, was going to share that code with Starfleet Academy so they could also have a Mac version.
November 11th, 1996, got a lot of feedback from QA on the pre-alpha. Changed some stuff around, like getting rid of the auto resolve for combat they had. Would run through the combat without graphics and showed you what happened.
Novebmer 25th, 1996, prepared an alpha that would be ready on December 16th. Had the opening movie, could made a character, several towns were in, travel the world map, one of the digitized heads was moving.
Early 1997, sent the opening cinematic to Steve Jackson games. Almost identical to the one that shipped. They did not like it, they had real trouble with some elements. Did not like the guy getting shot in the head, and hated Vault Boy with no uncertainty , demanded changes. Caused a lot of turmoil. They are well past the first ship date, and committed to another ship date already in the Fall.
February 17th, 1997. Steve Jackson shows up in person at Interplay. He is in the front lobby. Brian Fargo and Feargus both decline to meet with him. Cain talks to him, they talked for six hours, will not get into detail except that they did not reach any resolution. There were changes he really wanted that Cain was not empowered to agree with. The people who could make those calls would not speak to Steve Jackson, which was understandably frustrating for him. It is what it was. After he left, Interplay had a lot of meetings, asked Cain how hard it would be to remove GURPs. It was all modular, removed it.
Next note is March 3rd, 1997, it says that the game is entirely non GURPS now, full conversion to SPECIAL has been done for at least a week. Thanks to Chris Taylor for a fast design and all modular code. Photo of the team in early 1997 at 19:10.
March 17th, Cain wrote that the interactive demo has been in QA for a bit, discovered many bugs and got a lot of feedback and suggestions for new features.
April 19th, ran into electronic registration issues, was supposed to be drop in, it was not a drop in. Dan Spitzley saved the day and got E-Reg working.
April 28th, the interactive windows 95 demo is put up on Interplay's website, response was amazing, overwhelmingly positive. That same week, they got the license for Maybe, and would put it in the game.
April 12th (sic?), the demo continues to do well, they stop trying to estimate downloads. Did not have an actual download ticker. Many sites picked up the demo, they knew at least 100,000 copies were being played. One thing that concerned Cain was the UK branch of Interplay sent him suggestions for changes in content, like the level of violence and presence of children. Cain responded that it was 8 weeks from being finished, this was not the time to question basic design choices, they had two years to complain. Doesn't remember what they did with kids in the UK version.
May 27th, good news and bad news. Good news is that Mark Harrison has managed to compress the game to fit onto one CD. Cain was quite grateful he did not have to ask upper management for another expensive CD. Bad news is, constant issues with scripts. Not loading correctly, corrupting memory, it was a mess.
June 24th, is sending 3 new Fallout revisions to QA a week instead of one a week. Wanted faster turnaround on bugs. Sent a revision for each of the three major platforms, Win 95, Mac, and DOS. This was when QA began showing up on the weekends even though some of them were not being paid extra, they just wanted to play more. Very nice group.
Windows 95, very stable. Mac, stable, but has memory fragmentation, can be barely play to endgame but reported memory issues. DOS was very unstable, lots of crashing, traced to an error in sound code. One QA staffer realized extra crashing in the DOS stopped once you turned off the sound.
When did they ship? Interesting question. September 30th, 1997, a build was sent to the duplicator but QA found a bug that same day.
October 1st, final build is tested and sent to duplicator.
October 7th, 1997, reports from people on the Internet say they've seen the game for sale in US stores. Not until October 9th that they went to stores themselves.
Early October 9th, team members confirm finding game for sale.
October 10th, official release date of Fallout.
They did patches, work on Fallout 2 started, but that is the timeline of Fallout 1 development.

 

[Jigby]

That was needed, for posterity's sake. Epic Games still has the old release date of September 30th

 

[Roguey]

What's new to me (maybe I saw it before and forgot it) was that Fallout actually had a combat auto-resolve toggle at one point that got cut. That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

Also funny how Interplay UK had issues with the content after they had already told Jackson to pound sand and Tim yelled at them for not bringing it up much earlier. Kids in the Euro versions were in fact removed, ended up causing a bit of a pain in Fallout 2 because the kids were still there, just invisible, and they'd still steal your stuff in the den when you'd enter a building.

 

[NecroLord]

That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

You know you can just increase the game speed from the Options menu, right?

 

[Roguey]

That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

You know you can just increase the game speed from the Options menu, right?

I set it to max, it's still incredibly slow epsecially in big fights with loads of characters (e.g. the big fight in the Boneyard, though at least you can opt out of this fight and they resolve it without you). Need SFall to make things truly speedy.

 

[Butter]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

 

[NecroLord]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

The fight with the small army of aliens, floaters and centaurs?
Yeah, I agree.
But that's why you bring the heavy weapons with you (Gauss Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Bozar, etc.).

 

[agris]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

The fight with the small army of aliens, floaters and centaurs?
Yeah, I agree.
But that's why you bring the heavy weapons with you (Gauss Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Bozar, etc.).

Really fun encounter if you specialize big guns and use explosives plus grenades

Tim finally made a new video worthwhile. It’s interesting that neither Fargo or Urquhart would talk to Steve Jackson. My 2024 mindset says that’s incredibly rude and juvenile, not how you handle a disagreement at all.

Tell him to pound sand to his face if that’s your decision, don’t have your admin feeding him tepid coffee all day long