Tim Cain worked 12 hour days and 7-day weeks making Fallout not because of crunch, but because "we loved what we were doing"

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has shared his memory of an average day making the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment, revealing that he worked 70+ hour weeks simply because he and his team loved making the game that much.

In a video shared to his official YouTube channel, Cain described a typical day as one where he woke up around 6am, fed his needy cat, and then went to work and arrived between 7 and 8am. He said he would bring the cinnamon bread he'd prepped in his bread machine the night before to the office with him, where it would inevitably be eaten by his co-workers. Amazingly, he left the recipe for the bread in the comments.

Cain's lunch breaks were at his house, in part because of the aforementioned needy cat who needed play time, but more importantly because he was house poor at the time and living paycheck to paycheck, and making meals at home was more affordable. Most crucially, Cain said he would then return to work until a 12-hour day was complete, at which point he would permit himself to return home, take notes on the events of the day (a big reason his channel exists today, Cain said), and then go to bed.

"I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark," he said. Throughout the game's development, he would also work slightly truncated days on Saturdays, when he was joined by other developers he said were there simply to play more Fallout, an encouraging sign at the time.

However, toward the end of Fallout's development, a crucial period of time these days often defined by how much developers are forced to crunch in order to ship a game, Cain said he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

"I would frequently be shopping at two or three in the morning, to the point where some of the people there would recognize me," he said. "So that's what a typical day was like making Fallout."

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There's a metaphorical light in Cain's eyes as he talks about his early days at Interplay, and indeed, he assured fans that he was working overtime on his own accord.

"I know some of you are horrified, like, 'that's crunch. That's abuse.' All I can tell you is, no one was telling us to do this. We wanted to do it, we loved what we were doing, and we loved what we were making. I hope some of you understand that, and more-so, I hope some of you get to experience, at some point, making something that you love so much, that you devote time to it because you love it, not because you're being made to."

Cain made it clear that he's not on-board with crunch culture as it exists in 2026 game development, saying he's "glad things have changed," but again, there's no denying the smile stretching across his face when he added, "That was unsustainable, but it was also absolutely incredible."

Time to go make some cinnamon bread.

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