Tim Cain, the Fallout co-creator who led the original Fallout, talks on his YouTube channel about why he left Interplay in 1998 while Fallout 2 was still in development. He released two videos on the topic: in one, Tim talks about how Interplay felt about the series, and in the other, about the reasons that prompted him to leave the studio.
According to Kane, Fallout was “not a priority” for Interplay. A small team worked on the creation of the game, most of the employees in which were not very experienced (even for Tim himself, this was the first project in the position of head). Some thought he should do “something more promising” like playing under the recently acquired Dungeons and Dragons license.
At some point, Tim had to defend Fallout from Interplay president Brian Fargo, who intended to send the entire development team to the Dungeons and Dragons game. There were three such attempts in total, which, according to Tim, clearly indicates how “appreciated” the game in the studio’s top management.
Interest in Fallout arose far from immediately, and only towards the end of development did the project become interesting to many studio employees. And after one of the builds of the game was taken home by Brian Fargo himself, they began to treat the game with enthusiasm (which surprised Kane):
After the development of the first part, Kane “burned out” – he was tired, and was not ready for another twelve months of exhausting development. Moreover, as Tim notes, various decisions began to be “promoted” through him, which he himself would hardly have made. For example, the cover for Fallout 2 was chosen without him, and the prologue in the Temple of Trials, as Tim puts it, was simply “imposed” on the team.
Kane put up with all this, but at a certain point his patience snapped. The last point was a quarrel with management regarding the awards for the development of the sequel. Together with the producer of Fallout 2 Fergus Urquhart, Kane compiled a table where they contributed the approximate amount of bonuses to all members of the development team. Evaluated according to three criteria: salary according to the position; the time spent making Fallout 2; the value of the contribution to the game. Kane himself, as one of the key developers, should have received a solid award (he also acted as the lead programmer and game designer, and spent a lot of time on the project).
In the end, the opposite happened – at the end of December 1997 or in January 1998, Tim got a check with a very modest amount – according to him, he received “one of the three smallest bonuses” in principle. The personnel department told him that there was no mistake, and they sent him to Brian Fargo, head of Interplay, to sort it out. The same explained that he personally lowered the premium due to the fact that Tim “did not pass” the person responsible for the transfer of the first Fallout.
The situation arose towards the end of the development of the first part: Tim and the team stumbled upon an unpleasant bug that caused the game to crash. They searched for a bug for a long time, and because of it, they were eventually forced to postpone the release of the game. Cain ended up not telling Brian Fargo about who made the mistake in the code, taking all the blame on himself – and paid for it.
