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Fallout creator Tim Cain says he's often asked why he's not tried to remaster the original RPG - and part of the answer lies in just how aggressively he destroyed all his source code.
Recently, Cain has been making clear that he doesn't own any of the Fallout source code. When he left developer Interplay, he says he was ordered to destroy his personal development archive. That led to rumors that the entire code had been lost or destroyed, until Interplay co-founder Rebecca Heinemann revealed that she had the Fallout source code, and so did a handful of other people.
Nevertheless, Cain is not one of those people. That's partly because when Interplay told him not to keep any development materials, he took them seriously. "I destroyed every copy of the source code I had," he says. "I went so far to destroy it that I destroyed early prototypes and libraries."
It was an aggressive approach - so aggressive, in fact, that Cain can no longer get some of his older personal projects to work. Those projects "referenced a library that I destroyed the only copy of [...] when I destroyed Fallout, and all of the code, and even the early prototype that I made." With no library to compile them, those projects are lost forever.
It sounds as though, even if he did have the library, Cain would struggle to get those projects working. In a recent video, he lists multiple reasons why he couldn't get a Fallout remaster going, but one of those is the fact that the compiler the team used is a buggy, unsupported mess that didn't really work properly at the time. Even if it could work now, Cain says he wouldn't know - while he has the old CD, his PC doesn't have a CD drive to let him install it.
There are, of course, plenty of other obstacles between Cain and a Fallout remaster. Several of those are the kinds of legal issues that he says much of his original team would never have known about. Among those, for instance, is the fact that the game's music license might allow for a song's use in perpetuity, but only for that one game - the license never referred to the possibility of a remaster, so it would have to be renegotiated. And that's just scratching the surface. In the end, Cain reckons it's Bethesda who'd have dibs on a Fallout remaster - but with Oblivion Remastered having crawled recently from the woodwork, perhaps that's more of a reality than we once thought.
Remaster or not, Fallout's made its mark on our list of the best RPGs you can play right now.
