Fallout's co-creator and the original game's producer, Tim Cain, wasn't really supposed to share ideas with the rest of the team working on what would become the post-apocalyptic classic, so he scheduled a hush-hush after-hours pizza party to demo the engine that would eventually power the RPG.
"I was making engines kind of in my spare time," Cain says in a recent interview with Game Informer. "My job at the time, at Interplay, I was making installers for a few other games, because when games used to come on physical floppy disks – multiple ones – you had to have an installer, and there were a whole bunch of parameters for them."
Cain recalls that he eventually made a capable sprite engine, but he "wasn't allowed to approach" the rest of the team with it directly "because they were on other projects." He instead just found an office loophole. "What I did was I reserved a conference room for 6 p.m., which was when everybody was supposed to go home, and then I sent emails saying, 'I'll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine.'" The eventual Fallout producer says only about eight people showed up, and even without realizing it at the time, he "was self-selecting for go-getters."
Cain also remembers that fellow lead and art director Leonard Boyarsky was one of those go-getters that showed up for some pizza, though Boyarsky tells the website he can't really recall the meeting "because [Cain] showed us a bunch of stuff," including a 3D engine and a voxel engine.
"Eventually, when we talked about what we were going to do, as the art director, as much as I thought 3D would be cool, you really couldn't do very detailed work in 3D at that point in time," Boyarsky adds. "That's when we decided to go with the sprite engine, which he already had."
