In his latest YouTube video, Fallout creator Tim Cain gives us a glimpse into what it was like to make a game thirty years ago.
Cain’s video features many images from the period between 1994 and 1997. Not only is it a great way to see a time capsule of the era, but it also shows how a small team of people developing one of the most influential CRPGs, Fallout, managed to create a memorable, enduring game. The reason Cain didn’t just choose from a selection of game developer photos is because there were a few family photos in the pack…
In a 1994 Christmas photo, Cain revealed that the Fallout team was incredibly small at the time. It was him (the project lead), Jason Taylor (designer, programmer), Jason Anderson (designer, artist), and there was another artist at the time, Leonard Boyarsky was not in the picture. So it was a three-person team at the time, but in an earlier video, Cain confirmed that he started working on Fallout by himself in mid-1993, when he created the earliest version of the iconic 2D isometric engine.
The first group photo of Fallout also shows only nine people, and was taken around August 1995. By mid-1996, the number had grown from nine to eleven. The last group photo was taken in 1997, but by then there were 21. That’s heaven and earth when you compare it to Baldur’s Gate 3: Larian had almost 500 people working on that game. There were some shots of Interplay’s office, and the frivolity (colleagues harassing each other at work) was palpable. In one picture, Cain wore a Burger King paper bag on his head as a crown before receiving the news that he had somehow screwed up the latest Fallout development build.
Cain also shared a previously leaked image of two of Fallout’s original “talking head” characters. The in-game close-up sprites were created from images of the physical models as a sort of stop-motion animation. Photographed statues of Larry and Morpheus were apparently displayed in the lobbies of Interplay’s offices, but it is not known if either of them survive today…
Source: PCGamer
