Fallout Development Timeline

Pre-Fallout Origins (1991–1993)

In 1991, Tim Cain began making computer tools for GURPS as a hobby — a star system generator and a character editor. He sent the star system generator to Steve Jackson Games, who granted him a license to distribute it online. This existing relationship with SJG would later prove pivotal.

By mid-1993, after shipping Rags to Riches (his second Interplay game), Cain was assigned to miscellaneous tasks: building installers, helping on Stonekeep, and experimenting with engines. He built three: a voxel engine ("think Minecraft"), a slow 3D engine, and an isometric 2D sprite engine — the one that would become Fallout.

The GURPS License and Early Team (Early 1994)

In early 1994, Interplay announced at a company meeting they were looking for a tabletop RPG to license. Cain suggested GURPS; the only competing proposal was Earthdawn.

Steve Jackson visited Interplay in person in early March 1994. Cain showed him the isometric engine and the GURPS character editor. They had lunch at Disneyland's Club 33 (the same venue where Cain would later celebrate Fallout's ship), then played Steve Jackson's Illuminati card game that evening — during which an Interplay employee named Floyd Grubb got into a rules argument with Jackson and was proven right.

On March 28, 1994, Cain sent Jackson all the latest Interplay titles. The contract details happened "above my pay grade."

Finding the Setting (Mid-Late 1994)

The team's first external story pitch came from writer John M. Ford — a "non-linear time travel GURPS CRPG" that Cain recalls as "really wacky." They passed.

August 24, 1994: Cain wrote his first project wishlist — requesting Chris Taylor and Scott Campbell as designers, Jason Taylor for scripting, Jesse Reynolds as programmer, and Spencer Kipe as lead artist.

September 9, 1994: The art list was still generic fantasy — crossbows, swords, medieval armor, forests, and caves.

Fall 1994: Unable to officially start development, Cain held informal evening sessions in an empty conference room with pizza. Few people showed up, but those who did were highly motivated. During the second meeting, they elaborated on a "crazy dinosaur time-travel setting" with spaceships, wizards, and religious cults. This was simplified to an alien invasion on a future Earth with humans hiding in shelters. After further discussion (and input from Scott Campbell), they dropped the aliens and went post-apocalyptic, keeping the vault concept because it elegantly aligned player and character knowledge — both knew almost nothing about the outside world.

December 8, 1994: First mention of Junktown. Jason Taylor and Jason Anderson were officially assigned to the team. Tom Decker was removed because he already had 22–24 other projects. Cain received the producer title — "no extra pay, just extra responsibility."

The small team (Cain and the two Jasons) built prototypes: walking the map, simple melee combat, opening containers, looting. One prototype level shipped on the Fallout CD-ROM in a "demo" folder.

1995: The Project Becomes Official

January 2, 1995: Cain came up with his original Fallout story concept.

May 22, 1995: VP of Development Alan Pavlish requested voice actors; Cain was asked for a feasibility analysis.

June 12, 1995: The project became official with assigned team members. Brian Fargo required Cain to attend off-site producer meetings and write a vision statement. Cain wrote multiple versions, all rejected by Fargo. Chris Taylor eventually wrote one in January 1996 that stuck.

Summer 1995 team (left to right in a group photo): Brian Freyermuth, Leonard Boyarsky, Jesse Reynolds, Tim Cain, Jason Taylor, Scott Campbell (seated), Jason Anderson, Michael Dean, and Fred Hatch.

August 2, 1995: The decision was made to target Windows 95. Steve Jackson Games was unhappy, but Cain noted the modular engine (built on a custom abstraction layer) could support a DOS version as an extra SKU with minimal work.

August 16, 1995: Cain and Jesse Reynolds were temporarily reassigned to help Stonekeep ship. Scott Rodenhiser joined to create clay heads for NPCs.

August 30, 1995: Chris Jones ported the engine to Windows 95 in three weeks, making the game immediately playable on the platform, with a full version completed within six months.

September 6, 1995: Scott Campbell gave two weeks' notice. Cain immediately began negotiating to get Chris Taylor once Stonekeep shipped.

September 30, 1995: The team moved from the Fitch Building to a temporary building on Alton. Team at this point: Leonard Boyarsky, Michael Dean, Jason Anderson, Cain, Fred Hatch, Jason Taylor, Jesse Reynolds, Chris Jones, Brian Freyermuth, and Arlene Summers (2D artist who created many button sprites).

October 11, 1995: Helena Wickberg joined; team size reached 11. Marco Green was Cain's supervisor — not Feargus Urquhart, who was still a producer overseeing D&D titles separately.

November 13, 1995: An internal-only Fallout demo was built. Alan Pavlish thought it ran too slow. Fargo loved it, especially the death animations. Proposed ship date: November 1996 (they would not make it).

1996: Building the Game

January 15, 1996: Cain bought a pet emperor scorpion named Spud as the team mascot. Spud lived in a fish tank in Fred Hatch's office and dined on crickets — possibly inspiring the rad scorpions.

January 23, 1996: Team roster had shifted. Scott Everts and Nick Kesting joined on January 29.

February 1996: Cain gave his talk on effective team management at an off-site producer meeting.

February 13, 1996: Ship date slipped to February 13, 1997. The transition to 3D artwork (Cain's first 3D game) was taking far longer than estimated. Leonard Boyarsky tried making up time with weekend work, but it wasn't enough.

March 26, 1996: Mark Morgan was hired for ambient music — "great hire."

May 10, 1996: Marco Green was removed as director; Feargus Urquhart became the new director. The Mac version was approved but still had no programmer. Chris Salvo made a Mac version of the engine over a single weekend on his own time.

E3 1996: The team built an interactive and self-playing demo with two maps showcasing talking, bartering, combat, looting, and a mini-adventure involving rad scorpions.

July 25, 1996: Work began on the intro movie. The team tried to license "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" — Fred Hatch investigated the legal rights but they couldn't secure them without extensive legal work and royalty payments. They later found "Maybe" (possibly suggested by Gary Platner).

Marco Green was brought back to rewrite spoken dialogue — written dialogue that sounded great on paper didn't work when voiced. Green rewrote it quickly and brilliantly.

August 11, 1996: Fred Hatch and Cain met with Jamie Thomasson for voice directing. Cain noted: "He's really professional and incredibly easy to work with and he can get us some top-name talent."

Cain's coding time had dropped to about 60% during the week due to producer duties, demos, and marketing requests. He tried making it up on weekends, but it dropped well below half before ship.

September 11, 1996: Voice recording began. Chris Taylor and Fred Hatch handled most studio sessions. Cain attended one week to watch David Warner (the Ultimate Evil from Time Bandits) record.

That same week, Cain integrated Starfleet Academy's sound code into Fallout — a mutual exchange where he'd given John Price's team the engine, and they gave back their sound code.

Tim Hume (Cain's graduate school colleague) finally began work on the Mac version.

November 11, 1996: QA gave extensive feedback on the pre-alpha. Instant combat (a button to resolve combat without graphics) was scrapped. Auto-combat was retained briefly.

December 16, 1996: Alpha build completed — opening movie, character creation, world map travel, music, some sound effects, several towns, dungeons, caves, a vault, some cutscenes, and one working digitized head.

1997: The GURPS Crisis and Ship

Early 1997: Cain sent the nearly-final opening cinematic to Steve Jackson Games. They hated it — objecting to the execution scene and especially Vault Boy, demanding changes "in no uncertain terms." This caused turmoil because the game was already well past original ship dates.

February 17, 1997: Steve Jackson arrived at Interplay in person. Brian Fargo and Feargus Urquhart both declined to meet with him. Cain spoke with Jackson alone for six hours without reaching resolution — Jackson wanted changes Cain wasn't empowered to agree to, and the people who were empowered wouldn't talk to him.

After Jackson left, Interplay management asked how hard it would be to remove GURPS. The answer: it was all modular.

March 3, 1997: "The game is entirely non-GURPS now and has been for over a week." The full conversion to SPECIAL was credited to Chris Taylor's fast design work and the modular codebase. The entire GURPS-to-SPECIAL transition took roughly two weeks.

March 17, 1997: The interactive demo entered QA. Many bugs were found along with feature suggestions.

April 15, 1997: Electronic registration (E-Reg) integration caused problems — it was supposed to be a drop-in solution but wasn't. Programmer Dan Spitzley saved the day.

April 28, 1997: The Windows 95 interactive demo went up on Interplay's website. The response was "tremendous" and "overwhelmingly positive." Over 100,000 copies were downloaded (not counting the Mac version released a week later). The license for "Maybe" was also secured that week.

Around this time, Interplay's UK office suggested significant changes to violence and the presence of children — with just 8 weeks until ship. Cain pushed back firmly: "When a product is 8 weeks from being finished and changes are coming in, this is not the time to look at the design for the first time. Our design documents have existed for over two years."

May 27, 1997: Good news — Mark Harrison's implementation of Paul Edelstein's sound compression code got Fallout to fit on one CD, avoiding the expense of a two-disc release. Bad news — scripts were a mess, failing to load/save correctly, losing variables, and corrupting memory.

June 24, 1997: Cain increased QA build frequency from once per week to three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) for each platform (Windows 95, Mac, DOS). QA started voluntarily coming in on weekends to play. Windows 95 was very stable; Mac was stable but had memory fragmentation; DOS was unstable with crashes traced to sound code (disabling sound eliminated them).

Release

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 tested and sent to the duplicator.

October 7, 1997: Reports appeared online of the game already for sale in US stores.

October 9, 1997: Team members personally confirmed finding Fallout in local game stores.

October 10, 1997: Official release of Fallout.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHIabSKo26U