Fallout creator Tim Cain has discussed the need for better games preservation in a new vlog (surfaced by GamesRadar+), in which he claims Fallout publisher and developer Interplay Productions “lost” the game’s development archives, despite promises to keep them. Not only that, Cain says he was ordered to destroy all the documents he personally owned or had access to, as the company intended to solely preserve its archive.
“There’s a lot of organisations out there that demand to be the archive keeper, and then they do a terrible job at it,” Cain said. “They lose the assets they were in charge of keeping. This has happened multiple times in my career. When I left Fallout, I was told ‘you have to destroy everything you have,’ and I did. My entire archive. Early design notes, code for different versions, prototypes, all the GURPS [Generic Universal RolePlaying System] code – gone.”
Per Cain, Interplay Productions lost the source material it claimed it would keep. In fact, the studio reportedly contacted Cain a “few years” after he left, seemingly asking if he had any remaining documents they could preserve. At first, Cain thought it was a legal trap – but soon realised “no, they really lost it.”
The archives lost represent a key piece of gaming history. After all, Fallout‘s legacy is long, extending to multiple sequels and spin-offs, and even a well-received TV series. It’s impacted countless lives, and other game developments. There’s so much history to this franchise, yet much of it’s now missing, and is unlikely to be recovered, thanks to poor preservation.
Read: Game preservation is difficult work – but we must do it now
While some retail code was eventually recovered, Cain says plenty of other assets are now lost to time, including some original code (although he believes some folks may still have copies), original artwork, the physical clay models used to depict the game’s characters, the GURPS system integration, and more. All of these slices of the game and its history – how it was made, what it was inspired by, and the artistry that went into it – are missing or destroyed.
As Cain says, Fallout remains a very popular franchise, but it’s not only for this reason that it should have been preserved well. He notes the code used for the game is fairly universal and easily ported, and that there’s plenty of lessons that developers could learn from its construction. In addition, there’s plenty of other since-lost artefacts that teach more about the game, and game development of its era, as a whole.
At the very least, there is more of a push to preserve games in modernity, with many studios around the world now focussed on building their archives, and retaining material. As GamesRadar+ notes, PlayStation has a significant internal archive comprising backups of game data, going back 30 years. Recently, GamesHub also reported on The Strong Museum gaining a significant donation of the data belonging to now-defunct studio, Volition.
Games preservation is now better understood – and while this shift arrives too late to save the complete history of a game like Fallout, there is hope it’ll help to preserve the modern history of games, as it continues to evolve.
