Abstract
Problem: How does Tim Cain recall such detailed stories from a 40+ year career in game development?
Approach: Tim walks through the evolution of his note-taking habits across every phase of his career — from having zero notes as a teenage developer, through grad school drilling research documentation into him, to extensive journaling at Interplay, Troika, Carbine, and Obsidian.
Findings: His ability to tell richly detailed stories comes not from extraordinary memory but from decades of disciplined note-taking that evolved from paper napkins to digital journals to a 500+ page career manuscript. Gaps in his notes directly correspond to gaps in his storytelling.
Key insight: Writing things down immediately after they happen is the single most important habit — notes taken at night about the day's events became the foundation for an entire career's worth of recoverable history.
1. Early Career: No Notes, Few Memories
Tim got his first job at Interplay predecessor Pegasus (later Cyberon) at age 16 and worked there until 20. He kept absolutely no notes during this period — he was simply too excited about having a game industry job to think about documentation. As a result, he can only recall the extreme highs and lows from those years. Everything else is gone.
2. Grad School: Where Note-Taking Was Forged
Graduate school fundamentally changed Tim's relationship with documentation. In his PhD program (mathematics/computer science), he was expected to:
- Self-teach missing prerequisites — his undergrad hadn't covered automata theory or neural networks, and professors told him to figure it out himself
- Show extensive work and references on problem sets
- Defend research orally — requiring the ability to cite specific algorithms, papers, and authors on the spot
This environment made rigorous note-taking a survival skill. A side benefit: Tim's detailed D&D campaign notes from this period (the anti-paladin, the 18-charisma druid) survive because he'd write up sessions afterward.
3. Interplay: Contractor Habits and Financial Records
When Tim joined Interplay in 1991 as a contractor working from home, two forces drove his note-taking:
- Weekly producer meetings — he needed to remember questions and progress to discuss during his once-a-week office visits
- Self-employment taxes — as a contractor, he had to track every dollar for quarterly US tax filings
He kept meticulous financial records, first in Lotus 1-2-3 (early 90s), then Excel (late 90s), then Microsoft Money. These records still exist — it's how he can state his exact Fallout 1 bonus or document the period when Troika's founders underpaid themselves to keep the company alive.
3.1. The Paper-to-Digital Transition
Early Interplay work was documented on paper — sometimes literally on restaurant napkins. Tim recalls one napkin with a sketch of Lucy Luster from Rags to Riches that included profanity, drawn during a margarita-fueled lunch. By the end of his Interplay tenure, he'd shifted mostly to electronic notes.
A critical save: when Tim left Interplay he had to leave everything behind, but he'd been writing notes at home in the evenings. Those personal copies survived.
4. Troika: The Golden Archive
Because Tim co-owned Troika, he had every hard drive imaged and copied to each successive (larger) machine. He preserved everything: design documents, meeting notes, all correspondence. This is his most complete archive and the reason he can discuss Troika-era projects in such granular detail.
5. Carbine: Peak Journaling
At Carbine Studios, Tim's note-taking reached its most structured form. He journaled every evening in a formatted electronic diary — date, then everything that happened that day. Personal and professional notes were intermingled, which is how a Disneyland visit led him to discover Marty Sklar's Imagineering principles and realize they mapped perfectly to RPG level design. That journal entry became a talk he gave at Carbine in 2010, and later repeated at Obsidian.
6. Obsidian: The Gap and the Return
Tim joined Obsidian not wanting to lead, spending years as a senior programmer with some design work. He took almost no notes from roughly 2012 onward — shortly after leaving Carbine, the habit faded. This is why he hasn't discussed South Park, Pillars of Eternity, or Tyranny in much detail on his channel: those stories would rely entirely on memory.
6.1. The Outer Worlds Notebook
For The Outer Worlds, Tim deliberately returned to paper. He carried a physical notebook everywhere — the one with a hand-drawn rocket on the cover. It contained structured preparation notes (music direction briefs, meeting agendas) and post-meeting summaries written that evening. He chose paper because it was portable, keepable, and could be digitized later.
7. Semi-Retirement: The Idea Trove
After semi-retiring, Tim started a new journal filled with game concepts — post-apocalyptic settings, unique mechanics, stat systems, perk designs, exploration approaches. None are like existing post-apocalyptic games. His Lord of Light game design lives in there too. He describes it as a "trove" — if someone appeared with funding tomorrow, he wouldn't need to invent anything from scratch.
8. The 500-Page Book
Tim digitized everything and compiled his career notes into a printed manuscript exceeding 500 pages. A few people have read it and gave two pieces of feedback:
- It's dry — the written version lacks the warmth of his spoken delivery
- It sounds mean — stories that feel positive and funny when Tim tells them verbally read as harsh on paper
This feedback directly inspired his YouTube channel. Tim found that his speaking voice naturally adds the humor and perspective that softens difficult stories, making video a better medium than his manuscript for sharing his career experiences.
9. Why It Matters
Tim's meta-observation: he didn't dig ditches or save lives through open heart surgery — he "made computers go beep boop." People loved the beeping and booping, but he tries not to take it too seriously. The notes exist so the stories can be told accurately, with specific details verified rather than invented. He even cross-references his journals with former colleagues to confirm events he wrote down but no longer remembers.
The clear pattern across his career: periods with notes produce detailed stories; periods without notes produce silence. The teenage years at Pegasus, the early Obsidian stretch — these are black holes in his narrative precisely because no notes exist.
10. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0NKR9R0XTg