Legendary programmer credited with saving "lost" Fallout source code confirms it was never lost in the first place: "If I do get permission from Bethesda to release the source code, I will do so"

In April, Fallout creator Tim Cain published a video where he discussed the challenges facing game preservation. In that video, Cain noted that developer Interplay had ordered him to destroy his personal archive of the RPG's development, and many of the original materials used in the creation of the game had been lost. However, Cain explicitly noted that the Fallout source code was not among those lost materials – a detail that got seriously twisted as the story spread across the internet.

Rebecca Heineman, one of Interplay's co-founders, tried to correct the record by noting that the Fallout source code was never lost and that she, in fact, had a copy of it – a fact the internet misinterpreted as "Rebecca Heineman has saved the Fallout source code," which is itself not exactly the truth.

"Truth be told, [the Fallout source code] was never lost," Heineman explained in a recent Twitch stream, "and I'm not the sole person who has it. There's at least five people that have it. I know this because I spoke to Tim Cain about this."

Heineman left Interplay well before the release of Fallout, and eventually started working with a company called MacPlay, which was developing ports of Windows games to Macintosh at the time. Among the titles they had signed were Mac ports of Fallout 1 and 2.

"Since we were going to publish Fallout for MacPlay," Heineman said, "I got the source code, archived it, did a Mac port, released the game, archived the Mac source as well, and then moved on."

Heineman said she had been archiving source code she had access to since her Interplay days, since she knew the company itself was "definitely not doing that."

Now, Heineman has revived the MacPlay brand and is once again working on a port of the original Fallout games for Mac – this time, to modern versions of MacOS. But she also has an explicit note for fans: "Don't look for a remaster. We will probably release them in their existing versions on the Mac at first."

Heineman does say that if the team were to "somehow convince Bethesda to do a remaster," then Cain "will be on board to help us out," but the idea of a Fallout remaster is very much a "pie in the sky" dream for now.

While it's unclear whether Bethesda, the current owner of the Fallout IP, has a copy of the Fallout source code itself, it does own the rights to it. "If I do get permission from Bethesda to release the source code, I will do so," Heineman said.

The original point of Cain's video was about the challenges facing game preservation, and Interplay is a pretty strong example of those roadblocks. Heineman reiterates Cain's assertion that Interplay management – which, despite being a co-founder, Heineman herself was not part of – ordered employees to destroy whatever development materials they had access to as part of a non-compete agreement in their contracts.

Clearly, even besides Heineman herself, who got hold of the Fallout source code through an external contract with Interplay, some other employees must have ignored that order, given that a half-dozen people are known to still have the code.

Game publishers often haven't been interested in preserving their own work, and the long-standing advice from Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi to developers invested in preservation has always been "steal from work and put it in a box."

"Game preservation is only happening because people who still had it on their hard drives never deleted it, and are now coming forward," Heineman said, asking for those who do still have access to otherwise lost source code to contact her so she can help preserve it.

Check out our ranking of the best Fallout games.