Abstract
Problem: The detailed chronology of Fallout's development at Interplay (1991–1997) has never been comprehensively laid out from primary sources.
Approach: Tim Cain combed through approximately five years of personal notes from the 1990s to reconstruct the most definitive timeline he could produce.
Findings: Fallout's journey spanned from hobbyist GURPS tools in 1991, through an uncertain genre-finding phase (dinosaur time-travel, alien invasion), a contentious GURPS-to-SPECIAL conversion in under two weeks, chronic schedule slips, and a shipping saga where the game appeared in stores before its official October 10, 1997 release.
Key insight: Fallout existed as a concept for over two years before getting a real team, and the GURPS removal — often treated as a crisis — took only about two weeks thanks to modular code and Chris Taylor's fast SPECIAL design.
Pre-Fallout: GURPS Tools (1991–1993)
In 1991, Tim Cain began making computer tools for GURPS on his own time — a star system generator and a character editor. He sent the star system generator to Steve Jackson Games, who licensed him to distribute it online. This existing relationship with Steve Jackson Games would prove critical later.
After shipping Rags to Riches (his second Interplay game) in mid-1993, Tim worked on various tasks and built three experimental engines: a voxel engine ("think Minecraft"), a 3D engine that ran too slowly, and an isometric 2D sprite engine — the one that would become Fallout.
The GURPS License and Early Concepts (Early 1994)
In early 1994, Interplay announced they were looking for a tabletop RPG to license. Tim suggested GURPS, partly because he was already playing it with coworkers in regular Thursday night sessions. The only competing proposal was Earthdawn.
Steve Jackson visited Interplay in person in early March 1994. Tim showed him the isometric engine and GURPS character editor. They lunched at Disneyland's Club 33 (the same place Tim would later take the Fallout team to celebrate shipping). That evening, they played Illuminati — during which an Interplay employee named Floyd Grub got into a rules argument with Steve Jackson. Floyd was right.
The Genre Search
The project's direction was far from settled. In June 1994, Tim, Tom Decker, and Chris Taylor responded to a design pitch from writer John M. Ford for a "near time-travel GURPS computer RPG" — which Tim describes as "really wacky." As late as September 1994, the art list was still generic fantasy: crossbows, swords, medieval armor, forests, and deserts.
Tim's informal pizza meetings in empty conference rooms (held on personal time, evenings) produced the first real worldbuilding. Few people came, but those who did were highly motivated. Early ideas included a setting with spaceships, dinosaurs, wizards, and religious cults. This was simplified to an alien-invasion scenario on a future Earth, with humans hiding in shelters. After further discussion — particularly with Scott Campbell — they dropped the aliens, kept the post-apocalyptic setting, and crucially kept the Vault concept because it put the player and their character on equal footing: neither knows what the outside world is like.
December 8, 1994: First mention of Junktown. Jason Taylor and Jason Anderson were officially assigned to the team. Tom Decker was removed due to having ~22–24 other product SKUs. Tim inherited the producer title — no extra pay, just extra responsibility.
1995: Building the Foundation
January 2, 1995: Tim came up with his original Fallout story idea.
May 22, 1995: Alan Pavlish (VP of Development) requested voice actors. Tim was asked for a feasibility study.
June 12, 1995: The project became officially greenlit with assigned team members. Brian Fargo required Tim to attend off-site producer meetings and write vision statements — all of which Fargo hated. Chris Taylor eventually wrote the accepted one in January 1996.
Summer 1995 team (left to right in photo): Brian Fargo(?)*, Leonard Boyarsky, Jesse Reynolds, Tim Cain, Jason Taylor, Scott Campbell, Jason Anderson, Michael Dean, and Fred Hatch.
August 2, 1995: The decision was made (above Tim's level) to target Windows 95. Steve Jackson Games was unhappy about this, but Tim noted that since everything ran on his portable engine (GANAL), they could keep a DOS version as an extra SKU with minimal additional work.
August 16, 1995: Tim and Jesse Reynolds were temporarily pulled to help ship Stonekeep. Scott Rodenhiser joined to create the clay heads for NPCs.
August 30, 1995: Chris Jones completed the Windows 95 port of GANAL in just 3 weeks, making the game immediately playable on Win95, with a full port completed within 6 months.
September 6, 1995: Scott Campbell gave two weeks' notice. Tim immediately began negotiating to get Chris Taylor (once Stonekeep shipped).
October 11, 1995: Helena Wickberg joined. Team size reached 11. Marco Green was Tim's supervisor (not Feargus Urquhart, who was still a producer but GURPS wasn't part of his D&D division).
November 13, 1995: An internal Fallout demo was created. Alan Pavlish thought it ran too slow; Brian Fargo loved it, especially the death animations. Proposed ship date: November 1996.
1996: Production Ramps Up
January 15, 1996: Tim bought a pet emperor scorpion named Spud from a pet store, gifting it to the team as their mascot. Spud lived under a log in a fish tank in Fred Hatch's office, dining on crickets caught around Tim's house. Tim suspects Spud may have inspired the Rad Scorpions.
January 23, 1996: Team roster: Tim, Fred Hatch, Jesse Reynolds, Chris Jones, Chris Taylor, Brian Fargo(?), Leonard Boyarsky, Jason Anderson, Michael Dean, and Gary Platner. Scott Everts and Nick Kesting joined January 29.
February 1996: At an off-site producer meeting, Tim gave his talk on managing a team effectively. The ship date slipped to February 13, 1997 — they wouldn't make that either, primarily due to underestimated 3D artwork timelines.
March 26, 1996: Mark Morgan hired for ambient music.
May 10, 1996: Sometime between October 1995 and this period, Marco Green was removed as director and Feargus became the new director. The Mac version was approved but had no programmer. Chris Salvo made a Mac version of GANAL over a single weekend on his own time.
E3 Demo and Voice Recording
An interactive and self-playing E3 demo was built with two maps showcasing talking, bartering, combat, and a mini-adventure involving Rad Scorpions.
July 25, 1996: Work began on the intro movie. Fred Hatch investigated licensing "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" — ultimately too expensive due to legal complexity and royalties. They settled on "Maybe" instead (Gary Platner's find).
August 11, 1996: Fred Hatch and Tim met with Jamie Thomasson for voice directing. Tim described him as "really professional and incredibly easy to work with" with access to incredible voice talent. Tim got to watch David Warner (the Ultimate Evil from Time Bandits) record his character.
Tim also integrated Starfleet Academy's sound code into Fallout that week, trading GANAL engine access for John Price's sound code.
September 11, 1996: Voice recording began, primarily handled by Chris Taylor and Fred Hatch.
November 1996: A Mac programmer was finally hired — Tim Hume, Tim's graduate school colleague, now at Obsidian(?). Extensive QA feedback led to scrapping "instant combat" (a resolve-combat-instantly button) while keeping auto-combat.
November 25, 1996: Alpha build started; ready December 16. It included: the opening movie, character creation, world map travel, music, some sound effects, several towns with isometric representations, dungeons, caves, a vault, some cutscenes, and one working digitized head.
1997: The Final Push
The Steve Jackson Games Crisis
In early 1997, the opening cinematic (nearly identical to what shipped) was sent to Steve Jackson Games. They hated it — particularly the guy getting shot in the head and Vault Boy, which they demanded be removed.
February 17, 1997: Steve Jackson visited Interplay in person. Both Brian Fargo and Feargus Urquhart declined to meet him. Tim spoke with Jackson alone for 6 hours but couldn't reach resolution — Jackson wanted changes Tim wasn't empowered to approve, and the people who could approve them wouldn't talk to him.
After Jackson left, meetings were held about how hard it would be to remove GURPS. Tim's answer: not hard at all — the code was modular.
March 3, 1997: Tim's next note after the February 17 meeting simply states: "The game is entirely non-GURPS now and has been for over a week." Full conversion to SPECIAL took approximately two weeks, credited to Chris Taylor's fast design work and the modular codebase.
Demo Release and Final Development
March 17, 1997: The interactive demo entered QA, revealing bugs and feature suggestions.
April 15, 1997: Electronic registration issues ("e-reg") hit — supposed to be a drop-in, wasn't. Dan Spitzley (Interplay programmer) saved the day.
April 28, 1997: The interactive Windows 95 demo went live on Interplay's website. Response was overwhelming — over 100,000 downloads (they stopped counting), plus the Mac version a week later.
That same week, they secured the license for "Maybe."
Tim received a suggestion from Interplay's UK office for significant changes to violence levels and the presence of children — with the game 8 weeks from shipping. Tim's response: "When a product is 8 weeks from being finished... this is not the time to look at the design for the first time. Our design documents have existed for over two years but no one said anything until now." The children stayed in.
May 27, 1997: Good news and bad news. Good: Mark Harrison's implementation of Paul Edelstein's sound compression got Fallout down to one CD (avoiding the expensive two-CD scenario). Bad: scripts were failing — not loading/saving correctly, losing variables, corrupting memory.
June 24, 1997: Tim tripled QA submissions from one to three per week (Monday/Wednesday/Friday), each for all three platforms (Windows 95, Mac, DOS). QA started coming in on weekends unpaid. Windows 95 was very stable; Mac was stable but had memory fragmentation; DOS was unstable with sound-related crashes (disabling DOS sound eliminated the crashes).
Shipping
September 30, 1997: A build was sent to the duplicator — but QA found a bug that same day.
October 1, 1997: The final build was made, tested, and sent to the duplicator.
October 7, 1997: Reports came in of people finding the game in US stores.
October 9, 1997: Team members personally confirmed finding Fallout for sale in local stores.
October 10, 1997: Official release of Fallout.
Key Takeaways
The timeline reveals several recurring themes in Fallout's development:
- Long gestation: The project existed informally for years before becoming official, with concepts evolving through dinosaur time-travel, alien invasion, and finally post-apocalyptic settings
- Grassroots team building: Tim assembled his team through voluntary pizza meetings on personal time — getting fewer but more motivated people
- Producer burden: Tim's coding time dropped from full-time to ~60% and eventually below 50% due to producer responsibilities, demo requests, and meetings
- Modular engineering pays off: The GURPS-to-SPECIAL conversion, often dramatized as a crisis, took under two weeks specifically because Tim had built the system to be modular from the start
- The Vault concept's origin: Born from the alien-shelter idea, kept because it elegantly solved the narrative problem of player-character knowledge alignment
- Shipping is messy: The game appeared in stores days before its official release date, and the "final" build was actually the second attempt after a last-day bug fix
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvaJAzvMlWE