Fallout lead Tim Cain worked 70+ hours a week for 2 years to make the classic RPG: ‘I’m glad things have changed, that was unsustainable⁠—but it was also absolutely amazing’

In a new video on his YouTube channel, prolific RPG developer Tim Cain broke down what his average daily schedule looked like while working on the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment. Along the way, he reflected on the grueling pace of work he took on, and why it felt more acceptable in 1995.

Cain sets the composite average day in ’95, about a year into development. This is distinct from the irregular preproduction work that came before, as well as the even more blistering, seven days a week schedule he kept during the game’s final stretch in 1997.

Cain would wake up at 6:00 AM, take care of his cat, then reach the office by 7:00⁠—homemade loaf of bread in hand⁠, recipe helpfully under the video’s top comment—to get an early start on coding tasks when there were no meetings to interrupt him. Cain would check in with members of the team at midmorning, excepting the ones who requested to be left alone.

Cain’s lunch habits⁠—he would return home to make something each day⁠—touch on an economic reality that makes me wish I was born 20 years earlier. He was living paycheck to paycheck, and so largely avoided eating out… in order to pay off the mortgage he took on a house in Southern California. Not to take anything from Cain’s fiscal discipline and hard work, but these days in the games industry, you’re probably feeling the same squeeze sans property ownership.

One fun tidbit regarding that house: Fallout assistant producer Fred Hatch rented a room from Cain for much of the game’s development. “I need a little extra money … and he needed a place. So it worked out great for both of us.”

Cain would stay until 7:00 or 7:30 in the evening after lunch, coding for Fallout if he could, but more often getting called to meetings with other producers or departments at Interplay. He would eventually share much of this burden, including mandatory project reports, with Hatch. “I don’t know who read them,” said Cain. “I suspect sometimes they weren’t read, because sometimes they had questions in them and the questions never got answered. But the reports got written.”

“I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark,” Cain said of these 12+ hour work days. At night, he would eat, compile detailed notes on Fallout’s progress and the day’s events⁠—part of how he’s able to make such comprehensive videos about this time in his life—then be in bed by 10:00 PM.

At this midpoint of Fallout’s development, Cain also revealed that he would typically work eight hours on Saturdays, something he jokingly referred to as “Timmy Time.” With minimal-to-no meetings or production demands to eat into his time, Cain would work on programming extra tools or features that his colleagues requested throughout the week: “I’ll give you the feature if you give [me] content,” he summarized.

Cain rarely found himself alone on Saturdays, with other Fallout devs or employees on other projects also coming into the Interplay offices. In one amusing example of extracurricular labor at the company, Cain recalled that some QA testers were staying late, but not collecting overtime⁠—they just wanted to play more Fallout. Cain took that as a sign they were onto something special, though apparently it gave one Interplay executive some California labor law-related conniptions.

“I know a lot of you are like, ‘It’s horrible, they’re abusing you with crunch.’ I wanted to do this,” Cain said, arguing that “there’s nothing more exciting” than seeing the hard work directly result in improvements to a game. “I hope some of you get to experience, at some point, making something that you love so much, that you devote time to it because you love it, not because you’re being made to.”

Cain seems to have no illusions about whether this sort of work schedule has a place in modern, industrial-scale development, however. “I’m glad things have changed, that was unsustainable,” he said. “But it was also absolutely amazing.”