Playing My Older Games

Why Not Stream?

Tim addresses fan requests to stream himself playing his older games. He declines — streaming isn't his thing, and there are better streamers out there. He also doesn't want his channel to become an interview show. Instead, he went back and played his first four RPGs privately, taking notes on his reactions.

These four games — Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines — are not his first games overall (those were Grand Slam Bridge, Bar Tail Construction Set, and Rags to Riches), but they are his first four RPGs and the ones that kicked off his career in the genre.

Thank Microsoft for Backward Compatibility

Tim gives credit to Microsoft for making these old games still playable. Windows backward compatibility and tools like DOSBox make it straightforward to run classic PC games. He contrasts this with Apple, which simply doesn't care — people he knows who play Fallout on modern Macs are running it through a Windows emulator. Apple offers no backward compatibility for old software.

The Resolution Shock

The first thing that hit Tim: the resolutions are painfully low by modern standards. His early games ran at 320×200 — on a 1920×1080 monitor, that's six times less wide and 5.4 times less tall. Even his 640×480 games look stretched and rough.

CRT vs LCD Makes It Worse

There's a crucial difference between how CRTs and LCDs display pixels. CRTs work by firing electrons at phosphor, creating a "splat" effect — pixels bleed into each other with natural anti-aliasing. LCDs use a rigid grid of isolated sub-pixels (red, green, blue) with hard edges. The old games were designed for CRT displays, where the splatting effect smoothed everything out. On an LCD, you see every jagged pixel. Tim also notes that memory plays tricks — he always remembers games at higher resolution than they actually were.

"Why Did I Do That?"

The second recurring reaction: questioning his own past design decisions. As his design philosophy matured over the decades, he'd play through old sections thinking "why did I want the player to do this?"

The Party Alignment Example

His prime example is Temple of Elemental Evil's party alignment system — a mechanic with no basis in D&D rules. During character creation, you must pick a party alignment, and all characters must be within one step of it. Tim's notes reveal he added this to solve a specific problem: since any party member could be the active speaker (by reordering the party), unrestricted alignments meant good-aligned NPCs would happily talk to evil characters and vice versa. Party alignment prevented groups from "covering all the bases."

He traces this idea back to his high school D&D group, where they had absurd parties with paladins and assassins side by side. Party alignment was his table rule first, then a game mechanic. He's surprised official D&D never adopted something similar, leaving it entirely to DM discretion.

The UI Problem

The third and most persistent issue: the UI in all four games feels clunky. Tim references his earlier UI video, explaining that in the early days they didn't think about UI design at all — they just threw interfaces together. No thought went into accessibility, discoverability, or first-time user experience. The team interacted with these interfaces daily for years, so of course they understood them. New players didn't have that luxury.

Fallout and Arcanum both suffer from this. Tim thinks Temple of Elemental Evil's radial menu was better, but even that breaks down when you're casting the same spell repeatedly and have to navigate through Abilities → Spells → Magic User → First Level → Magic Missile every single time. He wishes they'd implemented hotkey bars.

Forgotten Content Everywhere

The fourth and most delightful surprise: the sheer volume of content Tim didn't remember or had never seen. Fallout is 26 years old, Arcanum 22 — memory fades. But more importantly, Tim didn't personally create most of this content. The only dialogues he wrote himself were in Temple of Elemental Evil. In Arcanum, his quest ideas were implemented by others. In Fallout, he approved nearly everything but was wearing too many hats to actually play through it all before shipping.

Even in Outer Worlds, which he estimates he played through 16+ times, there's dialogue locked behind specific skills, perks, or prior choices that he's never triggered.

The Joy of Rediscovery

Much of this forgotten content made him laugh out loud. Developers on his teams deliberately wrote things to amuse him. He recalls Outer Worlds writer Leonard Boyarsky's approach (attributed here to "Nitai"): when stuck writing dialogue, just think "what would Tim say?" The humor landed every time — even decades later, Tim could sometimes remember who wrote a particular line just from its voice.

The Verdict

Tim's four takeaways from replaying his classic RPGs:

1. Low resolution — worse than memory suggests, compounded by CRT-to-LCD shift
2. Questionable design decisions — made sense at the time, feel strange now
3. Clunky UI — the universal weakness of early RPGs
4. Hidden content — delightful surprises from forgotten or never-seen material

Despite all this, he believes these games still hold up and are still fun. They're available on GOG and Steam with compatibility wrappers. He doesn't profit from sales, but recommends them — they're just a little clunky.

References

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