Abstract
Problem: Which games will survive 50–100 years, and why is so much of gaming history already lost?
Approach: Tim Cain responds to a viewer's three-part question about game longevity, reflecting on his own career and the systemic failures behind lost games.
Findings: Fallout is the most likely of his games to survive due to Bethesda's mainstream reach and the portability of his GANOL abstraction layer. Arcanum is the one he wants remembered most, as it best represents him as a designer. Game preservation fails for three reasons: nobody thought to keep things, individuals hoarded their work privately, and organizations that demanded archival control lost the assets anyway.
Key insight: The biggest threat to game preservation isn't time or technology — it's organizations that claim sole custody of archives and then lose them, compounded by developers being ordered to destroy their own copies.
Which Games Will Be Remembered?
Tim notes this isn't hypothetical — we're already 50 years into the video game era. He still plays Star Raiders (1979), a 46-year-old game, on emulators and Atari anniversary packs. As for predicting which modern games will last, he draws a parallel to ancient literature: we don't know if The Odyssey was even the best Greek story — it's just the one that happened to survive in written form. What have we missed?
He declines to pick a specific game, acknowledging he hasn't played everything and would just default to personal favorites.
Which of His Games Will Survive?
Tim believes Fallout has the strongest chance, for two reasons:
- Bethesda made it mainstream. The IP's popularity gives it cultural staying power.
- GANOL makes it portable. Tim wrote GANOL, the OS abstraction library that Fallout and Fallout 2 sit on. It can be ported to any future version of Windows. People have already updated Fallout to run on modern systems without the source code — with it, porting is trivial.
Which Game Does He Want Remembered?
While Fallout is the practical answer, Tim's heart pick is Arcanum — and the Troika trilogy more broadly (Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Arcanum). He worries Temple is being forgotten and notes Vampire barely sold at launch despite becoming a cult classic.
Arcanum wins because it contains the most of Tim as a designer. Both Fallout and Arcanum were small teams where members thought alike, aimed at the same goals, and where Tim's ideas made it into the final product relatively unaltered. As lead, he had the authority to implement his vision directly.
Why Game Preservation Fails
Tim identifies three reasons games and their development artifacts are being lost:
Nobody Thought to Keep It
No malice — just negligence. Nobody preserved old design docs, early prototypes, or source code after shipping. When companies folded or dropped titles from their catalog, everything disappeared.
Individuals Hoarded Their Work
Some developers kept their code, art, or assets private. Nothing beyond the compiled library or final rendered asset ever left their hands. When those individuals moved on or lost track of their archives, the originals vanished. Only the final shipped artifacts remain.
Organizations Lost What They Demanded to Keep
The most damaging pattern. Companies insisted on being the sole archive keeper, then failed at the job.
Fallout: When Tim left Interplay, he was ordered to destroy his entire personal archive — early design notes, prototype code, GURPS code, everything. He complied. Years later, Interplay contacted him to say they'd lost it. They recovered the shipped version and a few patches, but the original 3D models for character sprites, props, and the clay heads used for character art are gone permanently.
Temple of Elemental Evil: Same story at Atari. Tim submitted an archive after shipping but was allowed to keep a copy (for code reuse in other projects). In the early 2010s, Atari contacted him — they'd lost the source code. Tim was able to send them his copy, but only because of that lucky exception.
The Bigger Picture
Tim emphasizes that individuals and organizations actively work against preservation, even if unintentionally. The amount of lost Fallout development material saddens him — the stories he shares on his channel come from personal journals and paper notes that happened to survive, not from any systematic archive.
This pattern isn't limited to the past. Games from the 2000s, 2010s, and likely the 2020s are losing their development history right now. Tim considers game preservation critically important but believes it isn't treated that way by enough people or companies.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F707wIeTX2g