Frequently Asked Questions

Channel Purpose and Boundaries

Tim states the channel has one purpose: sharing game development stories from his own career. He explicitly rules out several things viewers keep requesting:

• No remasters or sequels — He doesn't own the rights to Fallout (Bethesda owns them), Arcanum, or Bloodlines (Activision owns them). He can't make sequels, remasters, or anything with those IPs.
• No Kickstarters or new IPs — He's not building toward any product launch.
• No reforming Troika — He loves Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, but "we did that, it's done." He doesn't want to run a game company again.
• No playing/reviewing/ranking other people's games — That's not the channel's purpose, and other channels do it better. He points to the painful example of him and Leonard playing Fallout at an event years ago as proof they shouldn't do let's plays.
• No regular interviews — The Leonard Boyarsky interview was fun and he wants to bring Leonard and Jason back for specific topics, but this won't become an interview channel.

Employment Status

A frequently misunderstood point: Tim is not an employee anywhere. He's a self-employed contractor — not even full-time. He is working on The Outer Worlds 2 as a design contractor, but he's not a director and isn't involved in big or main decisions. He is not an employee of Obsidian or Microsoft.

He also did not work on Fallout: New Vegas. He started at Obsidian a year after it shipped. However, he played it multiple times including all DLCs, and did playthroughs joining Yes Man, Mr. House, and even one as a cannibal where he ate all the faction leaders. He loves and admires what the New Vegas team accomplished — it felt like "OG Fallout" and they did it in the same amount of time he had for Temple of Elemental Evil.

Code Ownership — A Surprising Detail

Tim does own the source code to Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil (part of his contract), though he contractually cannot release it. For fun, he recently recompiled Arcanum with a modern compiler under modern Windows. It generated "a surprisingly large number of warnings" — partly because it was a C codebase compiled with a C++ compiler — but it compiled and runs.

He notes that most of his code from the 90s and early 2000s was written to be OS-independent. All operating system calls were isolated in a library: called Canal at Interplay (for "General, Not OS-specific" or similar), and TIG at Troika ("TIG Is Canal" — because recursive acronyms amuse him). Because of this architecture, getting old games running mostly just required updating that one library.

Why He Only Tells First-Person Stories

Tim commits to only discussing events he personally witnessed. Former colleagues have emailed him with additional stories, but he won't relay secondhand accounts because he doesn't want to misrepresent what someone else was thinking, feeling, or planning. He tells viewers what he saw people do and lets them draw their own conclusions — while imploring them not to turn it into "a dramatic retelling of heroes and villains."

The Nuance of Memory

Even with notes, memory is imperfect. Tim gives a concrete example: Leonard Boyarsky reminded him that the temple at the beginning of Fallout 2 already existed as a level before the tutorial mandate — it was where you retrieved your grandparent's vault suit. It was skippable (dialogue characters could talk their way through, stealth characters could sneak). The tutorial format was mandated by the executive producer or marketing, and Tim tried to get rid of it but couldn't, so it was reformed into the tutorial that shipped.

Similarly, a former Interplay programmer emailed to clarify that Tim's random number generator work was for a star system generator, not specifically for Fallout. Tim acknowledges this is probably correct — his notes are written linearly but the dates aren't always linear.

His takeaway: "Perspective changes everything." Different people involved in these stories have different perspectives. His own perspective on events has changed from his 20s to his 50s. "Ironically, even though my color vision is fading, I see things in less black and white anymore."

Why Now — The Personal Reason

Tim was 57 years and 9 months old at the time of recording — the exact age his father was when he passed away. Tim was 24 when his father died, during his fourth year pursuing a PhD (two years of master's at UCI plus two years of doctoral work). His parents were divorced when he was young; his mother encouraged him but his father did not.

His father's death made him question what he wanted from life. The one thing that always made him happy was making video games. When he decided to leave academia for games, everyone — friends, family, colleagues, classmates — told him he was wasting his life. Everyone except his mom.

They all came around eventually. His thesis advisor and fellow graduate students later joined the game industry themselves and saw it for what it was: "a really exciting, fun place to work — and difficult."

He tried writing a 500+ page book about his experiences, but readers found it "confusing, disjointed, and sometimes mean-spirited." Yet when he tells the same stories verbally, people respond positively. His conclusion: "Apparently I storytell better than I story-write." So the audience gets videos instead of a book. The book exists, but "you're not going to see it."

The timing is personal: reaching the age his father died made him think about all these stories just sitting around undocumented. He wants to get them recorded — 42 years in game development is a lot of stories, and he hasn't even scratched the surface.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IZwda2fCKY