Sometimes obsessive archiving pays off—because it can preserve what others would have carelessly discarded…

Tim Cain, the original lead developer of Fallout, recently expressed sorrow over the supposed loss of the game’s earliest development materials. When he left Interplay, he was instructed to delete all early builds and even his notes from team meetings. At first, it looked like the company had lost not only the source code but also the concept art and clay head models used to generate the iconic talking 3D NPCs.

Luckily, it turns out that Rebecca Heineman, Interplay co-founder and programmer, preserved a copy of the source code for Fallout 1 and 2. In 1993, Interplay released a CD compilation containing one game from each of the previous ten years (Battle Chess, Bard’s Tale, The Lord of the Rings Vol. I, Wasteland). Heineman compiled the collection using her own personal backups of each game’s source code—except for Wasteland.

“I made it a quest to snapshot everything”

“I asked for the source code and got a blank stare. I went into the COO’s office and got a cardboard box that looked like it had been run over by a truck—with some of the source code on floppy disks. Eventually, I contacted friends at Electronic Arts and got a copy of the source we had sent them when we shipped Wasteland. I made it my mission to capture everything and archive it on CD-ROMs. By the time I left Interplay in 1995, I had a copy of every game we had ever made. No exceptions. When I worked at MacPlay, I did the same thing. I snapshotted every title we ported. Fallout 1 and 2 included.” – Heineman explained.

She had previously released the source code for the 3DO version of Doom on GitHub. Since she wrote it herself, she contacted id Software, and they had no objections. For Fallout, however, she would need Bethesda’s permission—which she hasn’t requested yet. But considering how Bethesda supports projects like Skyblivion, it’s likely they won’t object either…

Source: PCGamer, Videogamer