<
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/fallout/fallout-creator-tim-cain-says-he-was-ordered-to-destroy-his-personal-archive-of-the-rpgs-development-individuals-and-organizations-actively-work-against-preservation/>
'With each passing year, game preservation grows more and more relevant, and
you can add
Fallout creator Tim Cain to the many voices calling for a more
serious approach to saving video game history. Cain knows the struggle of
actually preserving this stuff better than most – after all, he was ordered to
destroy his own
Fallout archives when he left developer Interplay.
"There's a lot of organizations out there that demand to be the archive keeper,
and then they do a terrible job at it," Cain says in a new YouTube vlog. "They
lose the assets they were in charge of keeping. This has happened multiple
times in my career. When I left
Fallout, I was told 'you have to destroy
everything you have,' and I did. My entire archive. Early design notes, code
for different versions, prototypes, all the
GURPS code – gone."
Cain says that Interplay intended to keep an archive internally, but "they lost
it. When they finally, a few years after I left, contacted me and said 'oops,
we lost it' I thought they were trapping me into 'we're going to sue you if you
say you have it.' Turns out, no, they really lost it."
Code for the retail version of
Fallout was eventually recovered, Cain says,
but many elements used in the RPG's creation have not. The original artwork is
gone. The original version of the game, which used the
GURPS tabletop system
is gone. The physical clay models used to create the talking heads in the
original
Fallout games are also lost, Cain says.
While game preservation is often conflated with the availability of games on
modern platforms, true preservation work done by organizations like the Video
Game History Foundation is much more about saving the history and context
around the creation of games, like the development material Cain is talking
about here.
While some companies are now taking preservation seriously, as we're seeing
with PlayStation's massive internal archive, that wasn't always the case in the
past, and still isn't universally done today. "Individuals and organizations
actively work against preservation," Cain says. "The amount of stuff that's
been lost about
Fallout and its early development saddens me. I had it. I had
that in digital form and was ordered to destroy it."'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
