My Game Asset Preservation

tim-cain game-preservation source-code backups game-history fallout troika interplay obsidian

Abstract

Problem: How much of a game developer's personal work — source code, art assets, design documents, physical memorabilia — actually survives across a decades-long career, and why is so much lost?

Approach: Tim Cain walks through every game and company in his career, cataloguing what he preserved, what was lost, and the specific reasons each thing disappeared.

Findings: Even with deliberate effort, vast amounts of material are lost to dead hard drives, company bankruptcies, legal threats, physical deterioration of media, and the sheer difficulty of backing up large assets. Paper notes ironically survived better than many digital formats. Cloud-mirrored storage is his current best solution.

Key insight: Preservation requires both authority and responsibility — companies that claim sole ownership of game assets but fail to preserve them are the core problem, but even conscientious individuals lose enormous amounts of material over time.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAK0dtNT3kc

1. Source Code: A Mixed Record

Tim has all the source code for the Troika games (Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil) because Troika owned it. The publishers (Sierra, Atari) only had rights to use the code in that specific game. He also preserved the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines code since he spent his last year there primarily programming.

However, his earliest games are completely lost:

  • Grand Slam Bridge (Pegasus Software / Cybron) — Tim started at 16, had no home PC, and all work lived on company machines. When the company went out of business, the code vanished.
  • Bard's Tale Construction Set — As a contractor, he delivered the source code per contract. He kept a personal copy, but the hard drive it lived on died around 1993–94.
  • Rags to Riches (first Interplay game) — Same dead hard drive.

The hard drive had no writable CD drive, floppies couldn't keep up with the data size, and compression tools like PKZIP required separate licenses. He simply had no practical backup option at the time.

1.1. Fallout and Beyond

The Fallout source code was destroyed at Interplay's demand under threat of lawsuit. Tim complied. People have since approached him saying they have copies — he tells them to keep it.

At Carbine Studios, he did some AI and sound programming before switching to design director. He never thought to back up his code, and took nothing when he left.

At Obsidian, he has none of his own code, but for a different reason: Obsidian is diligent about archiving everything when a project ends, so he never felt the need to keep personal copies.

2. Art Assets: Mostly Gone

Source art is fundamentally different from shipped assets. Fallout shipped as sprites, but the source models were built in Maya/Alias as full 3D. Those source art files were enormous — far too large for non-artists' hard drives. Artists had bigger drives, and backups went to DAT tape, but tape deteriorates within 5–10 years.

Tim believes all the Fallout source art is gone.

The famous clay heads (used for Fallout character models) went into storage when Interplay went bankrupt. Some were displayed in the lobby. Tim doesn't know what happened to any of them, and nobody has ever come forward claiming to have them.

3. Design Documents: The Confluence Problem

Early design work was physical and got lost through multiple moves — school, cross-country relocations, different states. Later design work was digital but lived on Confluence, which is notoriously difficult to back up meaningfully. Exporting it breaks all internal links, embedded videos don't transfer, and the sheer volume makes local copies impractical.

Ironically, what Tim preserved best throughout his career were production notes: meeting agendas, post-meeting write-ups, rough production schedules, and event prep notes (GDC, CES, E3). These were kept on paper at home, surviving where digital media failed. Many were eventually found in boxes in his garage.

4. Physical Media Deterioration

Tim burned photos from the Temple of Elemental Evil London press tour (2003) to CD. By 2010–2011, approximately 5–10% of the photos were corrupted — despite being stored in a temperature and humidity controlled space and verified immediately after burning.

He also kept old consoles, handhelds, and his Atari 800 computer. Time was unkind: the Atari's disc drive failed after about six or seven years in garage storage. He bought a backup Atari Lynx for spare parts — both units eventually broke. Thermal cycling (heating and cooling through use and storage) makes plastic brittle, and the devices simply fall apart.

4.1. The Letting Go

Tim estimates the games and memorabilia visible in his videos represent about half of what he currently has, which itself is only about 10% of what he once owned. Multiple moves forced painful decisions. He gave away and threw away items he knows some fans would be devastated to learn about. His zen-like conclusion: "You just eventually got to let go."

5. Current Preservation Strategy

Tim now uses a cloud-mirrored dual storage system:

  • A large secondary hard drive on his machine mirrors to the cloud
  • Anything saved to either location immediately syncs to the other
  • If the cloud corrupts or the provider goes out of business, the local drive survives
  • If the local drive dies, the cloud has everything
  • The probability of both failing simultaneously is very small

He has converted his surviving paper notes to digital and uploaded them to this system. He also wrote a memoir stored as a PDF in the cloud, with a copy given to a friend as insurance.

6. The Authority-Responsibility Gap

Tim's central argument connects to his earlier video on game preservation: companies that claim sole authority over game assets have a corresponding responsibility to preserve them. The fact that even a deeply conscientious individual like Tim — someone who actively tried to preserve things throughout his career — lost enormous amounts of material demonstrates how difficult preservation is. Companies that don't even try have no excuse.

The difference, Tim emphasizes, is that his losses were despite genuine effort. Companies that lose things often never made the effort in the first place, despite claiming the exclusive right to control those assets.

7. References