Making Rags To Riches (1993)

1. Starting at Interplay

Rags to Riches was Tim Cain's first game as a full-time Interplay employee (his previous game, Bard's Tale Construction Set, was done as a contractor from home). He was hired around January 1992, but Interplay had completely filled all their offices — including a rented upstairs overflow space. Cain's desk was placed in the vestibule, essentially a hallway between two producers: Rusty Buchert (perpetually stressed — Cain says he never once saw Rusty in an unstressed state across six years) and Bill Dugan, a tall, lanky producer who introduced himself by leaning over the cubicle wall and saying: "Hey, I'm Bill Dugan, producer. Who the hell are you?"

2. The Super VGA Challenge

This was Cain's first Super VGA game — and likely Interplay's first as well. Super VGA offered 640×480 at 256 colors (up from VGA's 320×240), but PC memory mapping only allowed access to 64K of video memory at a time. The full screen required five memory regions with bank switching between them.

2.1. The Bank Switching Nightmare

Bank switching had to be done in assembly language, and it was different for every video card — not just by brand, not just by model, but sometimes by chipset revision within the same model. Cain specifically calls out the Trident 9600, which shipped with three different chipsets (A, B, and C), each requiring different bank-switching code. This predated the VESA standard. The game launched with a "pick your video card" list and an auto-detect option, and just before shipping, VESA drivers became available as a universal fallback.

3. Design on Napkins

The game was based on a board game called Speculation by Lee Audrey. Cain worked under producer Tom Decker (who had also produced Bard's Tale Construction Set). The two frequently went to lunch together — ostensibly on a quest to find the best Caesar salad in Orange County (winner: Marie Callender's, chicken Caesar).

During these lunches, Tom would design game features on the spot, often on napkins. Cain recalls receiving numerous napkin design documents, including one featuring a character named Lucy Luster with the instruction to "buy gold" followed by a swear word. He believes that particular napkin was drawn at the Marie Callender's.

4. The Failed Project Swap

In the office next to Cain's hallway desk sat programmer Mark Whittlesey, working on Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Cain was jealous — he was a huge Tolkien fan and wanted that project. When they got to talking, they discovered Mark had a degree in economics and actually wanted to work on Rags to Riches.

They went to executive producer Alan Pavlish with what they thought was a brilliant proposal: swap projects, putting each programmer on the game they were most suited for and passionate about. Alan said no.

His reasoning: "We can't let people work on the projects they want to, because what if we're making a game that no one wants to make?" Cain pushed back — why would Interplay make a game nobody there wanted to make? The answer was contracts and obligations. Even so, Cain suggested they just quietly swap with no announcement. Alan refused, saying people would find out and it would set a bad precedent. Both programmers stayed on their assigned games.

5. Chickenpox Crunch

As Rags to Riches neared completion in late 1993, Cain came down with a severe case of chickenpox — a particularly virulent strain that year which was infecting adults who'd had it as children, and had killed some adults in Orange County. He also contracted strep throat simultaneously, requiring massive antibiotics. He was out for two weeks.

Interplay got desperate enough to send assistant producer Fred Royal to Cain's house carrying his desktop computer. Fred took one look at Cain — covered in splotches — stepped back, and said they wanted him to finish the game. Cain refused; he couldn't sit upright for more than an hour. When he finally returned (greeted by Bill Dugan's "Oh dear lord, what's wrong with your face?"), he had to crunch for several weeks while still recovering.

5.1. The All-Nighter

During this crunch, programmer Chris Salvo (who later did the Mac version of the Fallout manual) stayed up all night with Cain to help him code and stay awake. Cain had never successfully pulled an all-nighter in college or grad school. At one point he looked out the window and said, "Hey, I think the street lights brightened up." Chris replied: "No, that's dawn."

6. After Rags: The Road to Fallout

The game shipped around November 1993. Afterward, Cain had no assigned project and floated between tasks:

• Wrote the critical error handler for Stonekeep (dealing with unreliable CD-ROM reads that required multiple retry attempts)
• Created Ganahl, his operating system abstraction library
• Built numerous installers for other games — so many that he eventually wrote an "installer installer" (a program that generated installers from parameters). Producers would ask for an installer by Friday; Cain could have it done by lunch but would use the remaining time on his own projects
• Built three experimental engines: a voxel engine (terrible), a 3D engine (terrible), and a sprite engine (good) — the sprite engine became the foundation of Fallout

7. The Genesis of Fallout

Cain reflects that this period — Rags to Riches and the unstructured time after it — was the direct genesis of Fallout. The combination of learning Super VGA, experimenting with multiple engine architectures, floating without a fixed assignment, and absorbing knowledge from other projects gave him the insight and tools to put something new together. It couldn't have been planned. It was a culmination.

As Cain puts it: Rags to Riches was his first Interplay employee game, and the game that directly led into everything he did after that.

8. References

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