Veteran developer Tim Cain continues his valiant effort to pull back the curtain on old-school RPG history with a new vlog detailing the cancellation of the original Fallout 3. According to Cain, the main villain in this story wasn't mismanagement, evil executives, or an inexperienced team - it was the same thing that's plagued us all: "money." Tim Cain has been diving into RPG history in a series of blogs for a while now, and he's uniquely qualified to speak on such topics as his heavyweight career spans Interplay, where he co-created ; Troika, where he worked on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines; and Obsidian, where he co-directed The Outer Worlds.
Despite having a heavy hand in creating the post-apocalyptic series, Cain's "last involvement" with Fallout came from contributing to the cancellation of Fallout Van Buren - the original, codenamed Fallout 3 - in 2003. After leaving the studio, a vice president at developer Interplay supposedly asked Cain to return for a day to play a mysterious prototype (Fallout Van Buren) before giving an estimate of how long the team would need to complete it. Cain agreed, asked the developers questions, played the prototype, and came to a conclusion.
"I'm convinced in 18 months you could have a really good game shipped," he supposedly told the Interplay vice president. "Even if you did a death march crunch, I don't think you could do it faster than 12 [months] - and then you'd be shipping something unbalanced and buggy, and the team would.
