Tim Cain Interview

The guys over at Duck and Cover caught up with RPG veteran Tim Cain for an interview about the Fallout franchise he helped create, its sale to Bethesda Softworks, the post-apocalyptic game they were working on at Troika, and more.

DAC: What happened with the mystery post apocalyptic game that Troika was working on? We’d love it if you could tell us a bit about it.

Tim: We had begun the development of a really interesting take on the post apocalyptic genre. The background was about as different from Fallout that you could get while looking a great deal like that game. We had made our own modern 3D engine to drive it, complete with real-time shadows and incredibly smooth character animation. Jason, Leonard and I wrote a background and system specification that would have made for a very rich game world to set adventures in, but we never found a publisher that was interested.

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DAC: Looking back, is there anything that you would have changed about the original Fallout games?

Tim: Oh, there is so much that I would have done differently based on what I know now. The interface could have been improved, and there are ways to speed up and balance the turn-based combat system to make it more comparable with modern games. I also wished our budget could have been larger, not only to make a bigger and longer game, but also to have a real marketing campaign. Sometimes I feel that Fallout 1 was basically an advertisement for Fallout 2. 🙂