Fallout 1 and 2's source code isn't lost after all, thanks to one hero programmer: 'I made it a quest to snapshot everything'
Tim Cain, lead developer of the original Fallout, recently lamented the loss of Fallout's earliest development materials. When he left Interplay he was told to delete his copies of early builds and even his notes from development meetings, and apparently Interplay has since lost not only the source code but also the original Fallout artwork and the clay models that were scanned to make the 3D talking heads some of its NPCs are blessed with.
Fortunately, it turns out Interplay cofounder and programmer Rebecca Heineman kept copies of the source code for Fallout 1 and 2, as she told VideoGamer.
In 1993, Interplay published a CD collecting one game it published in each of the previous 10 years, including Battle Chess, Bard's Tale, The Lord of the Rings Vol. I, and the original Wasteland. Heineman put the anthology together using her own copies of the source code of those games, except for Wasteland. When she went looking for it, she discovered others weren't putting as much effort into backups.
As she explained, "I asked for the source and was given a blank stare. I went to the COO's office and he gave me a cardboard box that looked like it was run over by a truck and it had some of the source on floppies. I ended up contacting friends at Electronic Arts to get a copy of the source we sent them when Wasteland shipped."
From then on Heineman took snapshots of the code for each game she worked on at Interplay, as well as those she ported for MacPlay—which was originally a division of Interplay before being licensed out.
"I made it a quest to snapshot everything and archive it on CD-ROMs," Heineman said. "When I left Interplay in 1995, I had copies of every game we did. No exceptions. When I did MacPlay, which existed beyond my tenure at Interplay, every game we ported, I snapshotted. It included Fallout 1 and 2".
Heineman previously made the source code for the 3DO version of Doom freely available on Github. "I wrote the code, so I gave myself permission, and I asked id Software and they said, 'Sure!' Fallout would require permission from Bethesda. I hadn't gotten around to asking them. They are on my list," she said.
Given that Bethesda is currently on a goodwill tour with Oblivion Remastered, even giving shout-outs to the modders working on Skyblivion, it sure would be nice to see them give the thumbs-up to the permanent archival of these two influential RPGs.
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