A Chat With Jason Taylor

fallout interplay jason-taylor gurps early-development team-history fev vault-13 tools chat

Abstract

Problem: What was it like working on the earliest days of what became Fallout, from the perspective of the first team member to join Tim Cain?

Approach: Tim Cain chats with Jason Taylor (JT), the first person hired onto what was originally called "Team GURPS," about their shared memories of early development, Interplay culture, and JT's career path.

Findings: JT's journey from Egghead Software retail to Interplay customer service to becoming lead scripter on Fallout reveals how the game's foundational ideas — FEV, Vault 13, jumpsuits, extruded food — emerged organically from late-night pizza sessions. JT's deep GURPS expertise shaped the game's combat rules, and his departure was considered one of the major blows to the project.

Key insight: Fallout's most iconic lore elements weren't master-planned — they emerged from collaborative brainstorming and only revealed their brilliance retroactively as they connected to solve later design problems.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K9UdXrLges

1. JT's Path to Interplay

Jason Taylor started at Egghead Software, a retail software store in Brea, California. A former Egghead employee named Scotty visited the store with a pre-release demo of Out of This World, revealing that game development was a real career and that Interplay was local. JT found Interplay's job postings on a bulletin board, applied for customer service, and got hired.

He progressed through the classic game industry pipeline: customer service → QA → production assistant → programmer. His first development work was on Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Enhanced CD-ROM under Bill Dugan, where he matched voice recordings to text strings — a crude system where text files had hashtag-filename markers that triggered audio playback.

He then coded mission scripts for Super Nintendo Starfleet Academy in 68000 Assembly Language — his first time writing assembly, handling AI flags and sector triggers. Despite wanting to join the GURPS project, he was first required to work on Stonekeep for about a month before being allowed to transfer.

2. The Earliest Days of Team GURPS

When JT joined in Fall 1994, the team was just him and Tim Cain sharing an office. His title was "Lead Scripter," but there was no scripting language to script — that wouldn't exist for a long time. Tim didn't even have an official title beyond being the de facto lead programmer.

With no designer assigned, Tim and JT started doing design work themselves. The game had no setting yet — Tim just knew he didn't want fantasy because "it had been done." They had a little knight walking around on grass as their first tech demo.

2.1. The Nightly Pizza Sessions

Tim organized evening meetings where the small group — Tim, JT, Jason Anderson, Leonard Boyarsky, Chris Taylor, Scott Campbell, Mark Harrison, and possibly Scotty — would eat pizza and brainstorm. These sessions produced many of Fallout's foundational ideas. Tim remembers there were only about eight people because there was leftover pizza.

2.2. Jason Anderson and the Art Pipeline

When Jason Anderson started (the same week as JT), there was no art process at all. Tim told Anderson to render sprites at night, and they'd figure out how to import them. JT wrote the first art utilities:

  • Frame Maker — a command-line tool that took a series of GIF files rendered by the artists and combined them into the .frm format Tim had designed, which included animation frames, frame rate metadata, hotspot centering for hex placement, and per-frame offsets. The walk cycle in all six directions was likely the first thing processed.
  • Frame Player (frm play) — a viewer that played animations using the engine and let artists tweak offsets pixel-by-pixel with arrow keys.

A major early problem: the walk cycle would drift slightly each frame and then snap back at reset. The cause was perspective distortion in the 3D renders. The artists couldn't disable perspective projection in their 3D software, so Jason Anderson solved it by pulling the camera back to near-infinity and zooming in massively — removing perspective while maintaining the visual. "It was the weirdest, hackiest" solution, but it worked.

The art pipeline grew increasingly complex with one-off utilities, batch file processing through Alchemy for palette unification, and eventually overnight batch runs. When the Mac got involved, they discovered classic Mac OS couldn't handle batch operations on more than 256 files at a time, requiring Christa Savo to implement chunked processing.

3. The Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV)

The team needed an explanation for the mutations in their post-apocalyptic world. The obvious answer was radiation, but Scott Campbell (or possibly someone else) suggested a virus instead. JT immediately ran with the idea, coining the term "Forced Evolutionary Virus" and proposing it was an engineered virus — not malicious, but scientists trying to cure disease or enhance humans, an experiment gone wrong.

Tim emphasizes how brilliant this turned out to be, though nobody foresaw it at the time. When they later designed the Glow (the West Tek research facility), FEV gave them a location where the virus was created, a reason it existed, and a source for antagonists. The Master — a collection of merged individuals and a computer — stemmed from this concept. "That idea was brilliant... it helped us later in ways we never imagined."

4. Vault 13 and the Project Name

JT suggested "Vault 13" as the project name. By that point they'd settled on post-apocalyptic, and Tim had established the concept of starting inside a bomb shelter. JT wanted something that "wasn't too descriptive about the setting but sounded kind of mysterious," and 13 was inherently a cool number.

The name stuck — the executable became vault13.exe and stayed that way until ship, when the installer would copy the files and rename it to fallout.exe as the last line of the batch file. The knight demo was even included on the Fallout CD-ROM for people to find (removed in later re-releases).

The name also inadvertently generated lore: if there's Vault 13, there must be 1 through 12, and probably more beyond 13. Tim recalls a journalist being disappointed to learn these weren't part of a grand pre-planned storyline — they were organic developments from a simple naming choice.

5. Jumpsuits and Extruded Everything

JT came up with the idea that everyone in the vault would wear jumpsuits rather than regular clothes. Leonard Boyarsky delayed finalizing the design until Tim "threatened to take the blues out of the palette." Tim insisted the vault suit be the lowest-level appearance — what you see when all armor is removed.

Tim also wanted the jumpsuits to be "extruded from a machine, like soft ice cream — you pull the lever and out comes a jumpsuit." This extended to food: during a tabletop GURPS sci-fi campaign Tim ran, the ship had a food extruder instead of a replicator. JT notes: "Every time I hear the word extruded I think of you."

6. The Spear Problem — GURPS Deep Dive

In March 1995, JT sent Tim an email titled "The Spear Problem" — a detailed analysis of GURPS weapon rule inconsistencies. He had created a character with Spear skill 17 (giving Staff default 15, Staff Parry 10), then discovered contradictions: spears can be one or two-handed, quarterstaffs are only two-handed, grip-switching takes a turn, and range rules differ. The email included page references, sidebar quotes, charts, and formal conclusions.

This level of rules lawyering led them to contact Steve Jackson Games directly. A rules authority (possibly named Sean) confirmed JT's analysis. JT wrote up proposed rule changes in "official GURPS-ese," and Tim believes these may have influenced later GURPS editions.

JT's dedication to GURPS accuracy stemmed from wanting the game to feel different from generic D&D fantasy — GURPS's flexibility in character specialization was the whole point.

7. Multiple Quest Solutions

The team established early that every quest would have more than one solution — not just combat, but talking, skill checks, and creative approaches. The rescue of Tandi from the Khans ended up having about 13 different solutions, including ones they never planned. Tim admits this made some team members nervous, but JT loved the systemic approach.

Tim told QA to verify that at minimum, the main quests could be completed with "wildly different builds," acknowledging they couldn't guarantee every side quest had full multiple-solution coverage.

8. Why JT Left

JT was attending community college part-time while working at Interplay, and concluded he needed a computer science degree for long-term career viability. He'd seen colleagues leave Interplay for jobs paying twice as much, and the game industry's low pay was "criminal" compared to other tech sectors.

His wife's job transferred to Northern California, and the combination of wanting to finish school and the move led him to leave — about a year and a half into Fallout development. In hindsight, JT says staying at Interplay would have been the better choice, but he doesn't like to dwell on regrets.

Tim made sure the original design team — Tim, Leonard, Jason Anderson, Chris Taylor, JT, and Scott Campbell — were credited in the manual as "Original Game Design by," because much of their foundational work was front-loaded before JT and others moved on.

9. JT's Post-Interplay Career

  • Hewlett-Packard (Roseville, ~3 years) — firmware for Unix servers in C and PA-RISC assembly. Starting salary ~$50K, double his Interplay pay. Laid off in ~2001 when Carly Fiorina initiated HP's first-ever layoffs.
  • Fluid Entertainment — reconnected with Scott Matthews (from Interplay). Worked on D&D Master Tools (canceled), then web development, then game design/coding.
  • The Broth (San Francisco) — Facebook games startup.
  • EA (first stint, ~3 years) — laid off when his project was canceled.
  • Kixeye (San Francisco, ~4 years) — mobile version of War Commander (Rogue Assault).
  • EA/Capital Games (Sacramento, current) — Lead client engineer on Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (the most profitable Star Wars game on any platform), then senior engineer on Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-Earth.

10. Interplay Culture Tidbits

  • Office names: Tim's nameplate at one point read "AI and Assorted Sophistry." Christa Savo discovered "Tim Caine" could be rearranged to spell "I'm Antic."
  • Aphex Twin in the office: JT played a lot of ambient/electronic music (including Ventolin) while they coded. Their office was next to a squeaky door and the fax machine.
  • Steve Jackson's visit: Steve Jackson came to Interplay and played Illuminati with the team. Floyd Grubb found a legal but obscure card play, proved it with the rulebook, and Steve conceded — then Floyd won the game.
  • Kirk Tomei: Also from Egghead Software, Kirk worked in Interplay customer service and was known for covering his Plantronics headset mic tube to mute himself while venting frustration at customers — until the day the mute didn't work.
  • Interplay size: ~120 people when Tim started, ~400 when JT left in 1995, ~600 when Tim left in 1998.
  • Tim's salary struggle: Tim had to threaten to leave Interplay to get a $50K salary to qualify for a mortgage. His mortgage broker told him a less-experienced programmer elsewhere earned double.

11. References