Late-Stage Troika

tim-cain troika-games game-development leadership postmortem fallout arcanum vampire-bloodlines

Abstract

Problem: What went wrong at Troika Games in its final 15 months, and what lessons did Tim Cain take from the experience?

Approach: Tim reflects on the period from late 2003 to early 2005 — the final stretch of Troika — comparing it to his earlier Fallout experience at Interplay and drawing on recent conversations with former colleagues at both Troika and Carbine.

Findings: Troika's flat hierarchy, lack of a final decision-maker, and Tim's own passionate communication style all contributed to friction. Being part of a smaller independent studio removed safety nets that a larger company provides. Tim's reputation inadvertently intimidated colleagues, even when he actively shared credit.

Key insight: Having a "benevolent dictator" — a single person with final say — can be more effective than pure democratic decision-making in game development, even if that authority is rarely exercised. The mere existence of that role prevents decision paralysis.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCmw7Hxb9HM

1. Tim's State of Mind at Troika's End

By the time Troika was winding down, Tim's self-confidence was "fairly well eroded." After Temple of Elemental Evil shipped to middling reception and Vampire: Bloodlines launched in a troubled state, he found himself constantly comparing everything to Fallout and wondering why that project had gone so much more smoothly.

His involvement in Vampire was deliberately limited — he spent half his day on HR, coordinated the programming team, and did AI for some boss creatures. He consciously avoided design arguments and publisher interactions. He just didn't want to fight anymore.

2. Why Fallout Worked Better

Tim identifies several structural advantages Fallout had over Troika's projects:

  • Interplay's resources: At crunch time, other teams could lend people for a few months. Troika had no such safety net.
  • Clear authority: Tim was the final say on Fallout, even though he rarely needed to exercise it. The mere existence of someone who could say "we're doing this, we've argued enough" prevented decision paralysis.
  • Established ownership: By the time the first hire joined Fallout, Tim had already been working on it for six months. With Jason Anderson and Jason Taylor, the core trio had a year of work before anyone else arrived. This established clear creative direction.

3. The Flat Hierarchy Problem

Troika's flat hierarchy — one of its founding experiments — meant there was no "final decision guy." The consequences:

  • Decisions didn't get made, got made late, or got made poorly
  • Democracy doesn't always lead to the best decisions
  • With Arcanum specifically, everyone was hired at the beginning simultaneously, creating a sense of mutual ownership that made it harder for anyone to arbitrate disputes

Tim now advocates for the "benevolent dictator" model: one person who can step in and make the call, even if they almost never need to.

4. The Passion Problem

Leonard Boyarsky later explained to Tim what went wrong interpersonally: Tim's passion was an asset with publishers and journalists, but with team members it made people feel their ideas were being squashed. It was hard for others to get their ideas past Tim's enthusiasm for his own.

Tim acknowledges this with genuine regret — he believes he did adopt other people's ideas (citing the famous example of Leonard's Fallout ending replacing his planned "party with cake and balloons"), but he feels bad that colleagues experienced it as "a big uphill climb" to get their ideas heard.

5. The Intimidation Factor (A Carbine Revelation)

A programmer from Carbine Studios recently gave Tim a striking piece of feedback. This person — who had been at Carbine longer than Tim and was one of the three programmers responsible for hiring him — admitted he felt threatened by Tim from the start.

It wasn't about passion or behavior. It was reputation: Tim had made Fallout, run Troika, built engines from scratch. The programmer said: "I felt like I was a small part of a big game, and you felt like a big part of a big game."

He explained that Tim unknowingly made people at Carbine feel defensive — like they had to prove themselves. There was a persistent worry that any game would ultimately be seen as "a Tim Cain game," despite Tim actively distributing credit. Tim never saw this happening around him.

6. The Decision to Shut Down

Tim reveals he was the one who suggested shutting Troika down, not Leonard or Jason. After Vampire shipped and they couldn't secure a new contract, Tim proposed they close. Leonard and Jason didn't so much agree as they were too exhausted to disagree. "Everyone was just tired."

7. Lessons Learned

Tim distills several takeaways from the Troika years:

  • Work with people smarter than you. There's relief in handing something off to someone you know will handle it well. Tim learned this in school and re-learned it in the industry.
  • You are not a business guy (and that's okay). Tim told Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart multiple times that Feargus was a far better businessman, speaking from genuine experience of having tried and struggled with the business side himself.
  • Try things, even if they fail. Tim is glad he tried the flat hierarchy, the co-ownership model, and running an independent studio. He'd always have wondered "what if" otherwise.
  • Beware unsolicited advice from the inexperienced. People who've never run a company giving advice on how to run one always felt hollow. But conversely...
  • Listen when people explain what went wrong. Even if critics haven't done what you've done, they may be showing you how to do it better next time — or when to hand it off to someone who can.

8. Eighteen Years Later

Despite shutting Troika down in early 2005, Tim says he still thinks about it "all the time." Troika was fundamentally an experiment — in flat hierarchy, in co-ownership, in independent development — and many of those experiments failed. But the lessons shaped everything that came after.

9. References