Do subscribe to Tim Cain’s YouTube channel if you haven’t already. The Fallout creator is eminently listenable and seems to have an infinite well of great stories about a career working on formative RPGs. His latest is on game preservation, in which he reveals that Fallout developer and publisher Interplay had to approach him after he’d left the company to ask if he still had development archives they’d ordered him to destroy. The reason? “Oops! We lost it”, Cain says (cheers, Games Radar).
Cain gives three reasons why he thinks we’ve already lost a good chunk of the medium’s history: either “no-one thought to keep it”, people wanted to “keep their things private”, or “there’s a lot of organisations out there that demand to be the archive keeper, and then they do a terrible job at it.”
“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.” (GURPS is Steve Jackson’s ‘Generic Universal RolePlaying System’, which Fallout intended to use until a messy approval process resulted in the creation of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system.)
“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,” Cain says. “Turns out, no, they really lost it.”
Among the casualties of Interplay’s slapdash archiving were, says Cain, the GURPS code, possibly the original artwork and, perhaps most tragically, the clay heads used to animate conversations.
A fine example of never attributing to malice what you can to carelessness, this. “No one is against the idea of video game preservation, but companies and their shareholders are against the idea of not making a profit,” the Video Game History Foundation‘s Frank Cifaldi told me last year. “It’s a technical black hole; It costs a lot of money to port a video game, and if the margins are just not there, then there’s not a business rationale to keep things alive.”
Still, there’s seemingly been an uptick in companies making more of an effort recently, such as Playstation using mineshafts to lovingly store old copies of Crash Bandicoot in. This is good, because Deus Ex creator and What’s On Your Bookshelf patron saint Warren Spector surely cannot rescue gaming history single-handedly, no matter how much dumpster diving he does.