My Memoirs

The Book

During the pandemic, after moving to Seattle knowing nobody with everything shut down, Tim Cain decided to compile all his career notes — physical and digital — and organize them by company and product. His Fallout notes alone span 86 digitized pages. The finished manuscript came to 558 pages: 345 pages of narrative plus 213 pages of appendices.

Source Material

Tim's note-taking varied across his career. He has no notes from Cybron Pegasus, but has physical notes from Interplay — things he'd jot down before meetings. He started journaling lightly during the Interplay era, journaled heavily through Troika, continued at Carbine, tapered off at Obsidian, then picked it back up for The Outer Worlds.

Because Troika was his own company, he has the richest archive: emails, backup images of every hard drive he used. However, since he wasn't an artist, these backups lack art assets and models — he has Arcanum's code but not its art.

The Review Process

Tim had six people read the manuscript:

• Three former colleagues whose names appear alongside his in shipped games — to keep him grounded to the facts
• Two trusted game developers he'd never shipped a game with — for outside perspective
• His brother (two years older) — who shared his early life experiences with D&D, Atari VCS, and getting his first Atari 800 at age 14

After each reader, Tim did substantial editing: clarifying stories, reorganizing chronology, and moving disconnected side stories into appendices on readers' recommendations.

The Four Universal Criticisms

Despite varying individual feedback, all six readers converged on the same four problems:

The Writing Is Dry

Readers were surprised — Tim's verbal storytelling is engaging, but the same stories felt flat on the page. One reader said when she could hear his voice in her head, the stories worked, but unfamiliar ones felt dry. Tim's eventual solution: his YouTube channel. Instead of fixing the book, he started telling the stories verbally.

He Sounds Mean-Spirited

Every reader flagged this, yet when Tim tells the same stories on camera, viewers describe him as positive. Interestingly, no two readers agreed on which stories sounded mean — one would flag a passage as harsh while another found the same section level-headed.

Too Much Blame

Despite giving extensive credit and taking significant blame himself, readers felt the book was blame-heavy. One reader articulated a specific pattern: blaming someone above him read as distrusting management, while blaming someone below him felt like punching down. Tim struggled with this — how do you narrate what went wrong without identifying who was responsible?

Factual Disagreements

Former colleagues disagreed on event ordering. Tim was careful never to project anyone's internal thoughts or motivations — he only wrote what people did and said, often backed by notes or corroborating witnesses. One reader suggested this restraint might itself contribute to the dryness. But Tim refused to speculate on why people did things when he often didn't know himself.

The Memory Problem

The disagreements became so fraught that Tim consulted a grad school friend — a PhD neurobiologist specializing in learning and memory, now an award-winning professor. The scientist's assessment was sobering:

• Tim could never resolve what really happened, not through his own notes (biased by interpretation) nor through witnesses (who carry their own biases)
• Studies show people remember provably wrong details — weather on specific dates, where they were during major events — and deny evidence that corrects them
• Memory distortion is worse for extreme events: people disproportionately inflate their contributions to hit games and minimize their role in failures
• A definitive history of making those games probably can't be written

But the professor offered consolation: everyone's memories are equally unreliable. Tim was writing a memoir, not a history book. By including both credit and blame, both successes and failures, his reconstruction was likely the best version he could produce.

The Shelving

Tim sent his six readers a final email announcing he was shelving the book "literally and figuratively." The contradictory feedback was irreconcilable, and approaching former colleagues for fact-checking only produced more contradictions. In one striking case, two ex-coworkers validated a story — only for Tim to later find a timestamped email proving all three of them remembered it wrong.

He noted that other game industry memoirs face the same challenges — reading Sid Meier's memoir, he could spot unexplained gaps where stories were clearly omitted. He expressed interest in John Romero's then-upcoming book but remained doubtful his own could ever be edited past its fundamental issues.

Why This Video Exists

Tim made this video as a definitive answer to the recurring question about his book, especially from viewers of his earlier "My Notes" video. Rather than repeatedly explaining the situation, he wanted one reference point. The book sits on his shelf — finished, documented, and representing the best reconstruction of his career he could make. That, he says, brings a certain sense of relief.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvgttRI7oSU