Original Fallout lead Tim Cain has a big hand in gaming history, and has publicly lamented the state of game preservation more than once. Cain himself has tried to save a fair bit of the history around his games, and it all serves as a perfect illustration of just why game preservation is so hard to do effectively.
In a new video, Cain laments how game companies keep losing old development materials while actively obstructing their employees from doing their own preservation work.
"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. "It just kind of makes me mad when repeatedly companies, and especially people high up at companies, take authority but not responsibility."
Earlier this year, Cain revealed that he'd been ordered to destroy his personal archive of Fallout's development, including the original source code. While others did manage to preserve that code despite those orders from developer Interplay, the company's scorched-earth approach to protecting itself from IP theft certainly scared some of its employees into deleting material that now may be lost forever.
"People say, 'why didn't you keep a copy of it?' When you're being threatened with a lawsuit, you delete it," Cain says.
When it comes to Fallout, Cain also believes that the original 3D model data and the physical clay heads used to create the animated character portraits were both lost. At least, he's not aware of anyone who's managed to hang onto them.
Game preservation isn't just about making sure modern players can continue to easily play classic games - it's also about saving development materials used in the making of those old titles, and making it easier for developers, historians, and players to learn from the past. Historically, companies have not been interested in saving their own history,
Cain lost the source code for many of his early games, too, but after his experience with Fallout, he made efforts to hang onto the development materials for future projects. That includes titles like Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil, all of which were developed at Troika Games, the studio Cain co-founded with several other Fallout veterans. But that doesn't mean he's free to release that code publicly.
"We can't give it out," Cain says of the Troika code. "I've already talked about that. I don't own it for the sense of being able to put it out as open source, but I owned it in terms of, this is my code, I can reuse it in other games if I want. The two publishers in this case, Sierra and Atari, they owned it only for use in that one game. Not even a remake."
Cain also preserved the code for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but doesn't make clear the exact ownership of that code. He also doesn't have anything from his time at Obsidian, but he notes that "Obsidian is really good about backing stuff up. When a game ends they do a backup and archive of all the stuff."
Throughout the video, Cain flags how much development material, from source code to original production notes, has been lost to time. Hard drives fail. Papers get lost in moves. Physical archives of digital media can sometimes rot away in short order.
"This is the best I can do," Cain says. "I've lost stuff and I think I take an active effort to try to keep a lot of things, so I can see why companies have lost stuff. However, they had the responsibility to do it and that I think is the difference. I think more companies need to step up and take that responsibility more seriously if they're going to claim the sole authority."
Check out our ranking of the best Fallout games.
