Considering that a 40-hour workweek is the norm, what Tim Cain did in the mid-1990s seems extreme!

In a new video, he showed what his daily work schedule was like while working on the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment. He reflected on the grueling pace and explained why it seemed more acceptable in 1995. Cain based his account on an average day in 1995, about a year into development. This differed from the irregular preparatory work earlier in the process and the even more demanding seven-day-a-week schedule the team maintained during the game’s final stages in 1997.

Cain woke up at 6:00 a.m., took care of his cat, and arrived at the office by 7:00 a.m. with homemade bread in hand, ready to start coding before meetings interrupted him. He visited team members in the morning, except for those who asked to be left alone. His lunch habits were frugal because he lived paycheck to paycheck; he went home every day to cook something and largely avoided eating out in order to pay the mortgage on his Southern California home. Fred Hatch, Fallout‘s assistant producer, rented a room from Cain for most of the game’s development.

Cain worked until seven or seven-thirty in the evening, coding Fallout when he could. More often than not, however, he was called away to meetings organized by other Interplay producers or departments. Eventually, he shared most of this burden, including mandatory project reports, with Hatch. Cain doesn’t know who read them. He suspects that sometimes they weren’t read because they contained unanswered questions, yet the reports were still written. Cain often went to work in the dark and came home in the dark. He ate dinner, took detailed notes on Fallout‘s progress and the day’s events, and this also contributed to his ability to make comprehensive videos about this period of his life. He was always in bed by 10 p.m.

During the development of Fallout, Cain revealed that he usually worked eight hours on Saturdays, jokingly referring to it as “Timmy Time.” With few meetings or development requirements, he worked on programming extra tools or features his colleagues had asked for during the week. He said he would give them the feature if they gave him the content. Cain was rarely alone on Saturdays because other Fallout developers and employees working on different projects also came to the Interplay office. An amusing example of “after-hours work” at Interplay was when quality assurance testers stayed late but did not log their overtime because they wanted to play more Fallout. Cain took this as a sign that they had stumbled upon something special. However, it obviously caused issues with California labor laws for an Interplay executive.

Cain said he wanted to do this even if it was considered overtime abuse, adding that nothing is more exciting than seeing hard work directly result in improvements to the game. He hopes that some of us will someday have the opportunity to create something we love so much that we spend time on it because we love it, not because we have to. However, Cain does not delude himself about whether this kind of work schedule has a place in modern, industrial-scale development.

He is glad that things have changed because the situation was unsustainable. At the same time, he called it wonderful.

Source: PCGamer