Fallout Creator Was Forced To Delete Original Fallout Source Code, Blames Companies For Failing To Preserve Gaming History

Fallout creator Tim Cain has always been vocal about his opinions on the gaming industry over on his YouTube channel, a fantastic repository of thoughts from a legendary game developer.

In recent videos, Cain has touched upon the topic of game preservation: the act of ensuring that a game and/or assets related to its development remain accessible for future generations.

There are a ton of “lost” games, some partially lost and some completely gone. A game becoming lost can be as simple as an online game on an old storefront shutting down, such as Xbox Live’s 1 vs 100, a game I enjoyed as a child. Games considered ‘completely’ lost are often mobile exclusives, designed for specific phones before the advent of universal operating systems like Android and IOS. Occasionally, an old discarded phone with these games installed is found, and the game preservation community rejoices.

Bigger Than IP Rights

Cain previously spoke on this subject, explaining how Interplay forced him to delete the source code of the original Fallout, and threatened him with a lawsuit to ensure he complied with the order. He says companies don’t want to take the responsibility for game preservation, but equally, they won’t allow anyone else to take responsibility, either.

“If you take the authority to keep these things, and tell other people not to, and they have no right to, then you also have to take the responsibility to keep them,” Cain says, in a new video. “It just kind of makes me mad when repeatedly companies, and especially people high up at companies, take authority but not responsibility.”

For example, Cain believes the physical clay heads used to model the original Fallout characters have been lost forever. He laments this needless loss of history in the name of intellectual property rights.

While Cain doesn’t have anything saved from his time at Obsidian, he says that Obsidian is especially diligent in saving everything. When a development cycle is finished, Obsidian will archive and back up everything used in the development of that game.

That’s heartening to hear, as we will most certainly look back in the decades to come and wonder why we let something as artificial as copyright stand in the way of preserving the history of the medium.

First TV Show

Fallout

First Episode Air Date

April 10, 2024

Cast

Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moises Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Walton Goggins

Where to watch

Amazon Prime Video