Tim Cain GDC 2012 Fallout Post-mortem Live

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But best title ever!
GameSpot is offering a live stream of Tim Cain's Fallout post-mortem going on now at GDC 2012. The video most likely will get uploaded when it's finished, so we'll update the link then.

EDIT: embedded video: Cain appears from about the 8 minute mark, and speaks for about an hour.

EDIT 2: Since that video doesn't work we've switched to another one that focuses solely on Tim Cain, linked to us by comrade Ed of Vault 13.

<center><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Xa5IzHhAdi4?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></center>
 
Good stuff so far. Gizmo is named after his dead pet skunk. Had no idea people keep skunks as pets.
 
Hah, this made me laugh. They didn't get it certified for Windows 95 because it also worked on Windows NT. Sooo they had to break the installer to get it certified. Flawless logic!
 
Watching comments too (not gamespot on twitter) for reactions. Bad idea.

@RussFrushtick The only REAL role the first Fallout plays is to make us all really appreciate how far gaming has come since..
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@RussFrushtick The only REAL role the first Fallout plays is to make us all really appreciate how far gaming has come since..
Click to expand...

[spoiler:04d5acf945]
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[/spoiler:04d5acf945]
 
Hah, this made me laugh. They didn't get it certified for Windows 95 because it also worked on Windows NT. Sooo they had to break the installer to get it certified. Flawless logic!
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Confused me a bit, he claimed that the auto installer didn't work on NT based OS'. I swear it did work on ME, which was an NT OS surely?
 
Very interesting video! Some very funny bits in there, especially the Win 95 certification part!

Yoshi525 said:
I swear it did work on ME, which was an NT OS surely?
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Nah ME was the last Win 9x OS.
 
For me I thought it was interesting hearing him talk about the cohesiveness of Interplay in those days. So rare. Even the marketing people "got it", when it came to the game.

I still remember buying Fallout at Best Buy when it was brand spanking new, and the thing that grabbed me was the cohesive theme to the box art. I had never even heard of Fallout when I bought it. Sitting there with the rest of the games, it looked like something that had come out of a bombed out building. The box, the CD case art, the reference card that looked like a menu from a diner, the spiral bound handbook, all look as if they came out of the game. It was all quite overwhelming, and I still remember that first time I booted up the game and just got lost in it.

That's an experience in gaming I've chased after, like a crack fiend, since then. It's rare to buy something blindly, and just be completely blown away by it.
 
Hey... Tim used my video of the Fallout prototype. :clap:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOVLdmEHkg[/youtube]
 
Now imagine punk dinosaurs and an ape, throwing banans at you while you watch that video.


/Edit: I am a little bit confused. Tim Cain says, the first quest was timed and 50% of the team loved it, the other 50% hated it. They kept it until the game shipped... and removed the timelimit with the first patch. But the first quest is "find the water chip" and the timelimit was always present as far as I can remember. Maybe he means the mutant invasion instead? Even here, I can't remember if it was in the unpatched version or not... I never had any issues with it (though, maybe I always patched the game... really no clue).
 
Lexx said:
/Edit: I am a little bit confused. Tim Cain says, the first quest was timed and 50% of the team loved it, the other 50% hated it. They kept it until the game shipped... and removed the timelimit with the first patch. But the first quest is "find the water chip" and the timelimit was always present as far as I can remember. Maybe he means the mutant invasion instead? Even here, I can't remember if it was in the unpatched version or not... I never had any issues with it (though, maybe I always patched the game... really no clue).
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I think (but am not positive), that he meant he would like to have removed the time limit on the waterchip quest... (I don't understand how that could work.)

The other timed quest (again I think ~IIRC), was perhaps to do with the master's army... I dunno, I seem to recall that if you visit Necropolis too late, they are all dead; and something about if you send the water merchants to the vault, they get additional time (from the water), but are found out and eventually attacked by the mutants. ** I may be way off about the details. Its been a long time.
 
/Edit: I am a little bit confused. Tim Cain says, the first quest was timed and 50% of the team loved it, the other 50% hated it. They kept it until the game shipped... and removed the timelimit with the first patch. But the first quest is "find the water chip" and the timelimit was always present as far as I can remember. Maybe he means the mutant invasion instead? Even here, I can't remember if it was in the unpatched version or not... I never had any issues with it (though, maybe I always patched the game... really no clue).
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm fairly certain the water chip time limit was never removed. There was a patch that removed the mutant invasion time limit; not that it really mattered as you were unlikely to ever hit that time limit anyway.
 
In the unpatched Fallout, the mutant army would indeed overrun various towns over time, and there was a time limit before they took over Vault 13 as well. The water chip limit was never removed.

One remnant of this is Patrick the Celt's dialogue. He still mentions the various towns as destroyed after the original time limits, even though they're not in the patched version:

http://www.falloutwiki.com/PATRICK.MSG
 
Thought so. Well, I agree that this limit was bad, because it had been way too short. In theory, the Boneyard was overrun by mutants already even before the waterchip timelimit was over. So probably most of the players would have lost quite a lot of the games content (and got a much harder game in return). I still remember how annoying it was when I played Fallout with the latest TeamX patch / restorated content. I was just out of the Hub, got the waterchip back to Vault 13 and then every town was overrun. Boneyard, Hub, Junktown, Brotherhood... So the only way left for me was to get RadX from wherever and then visit the Glow for a set of Combat Armor and stuff, with which I then ninja-destroyed Mariposa and the Cathedral.
 
Brother None said:
Chris used to speculate it was the Dunblane Massacre that led to the rigid response over the pond. Little awkward Cain's didn't remember.
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Very awkward,

Dunblane was a bloody tragedy.

But the interview was geared towards Americans who for the most part dont really care what happens outside their own borders.
 
When Tim mentioned a massacre, my first thought was Dunblane, largely because it's fairly nearby and I have a few friends-of-friends who were at the school at the time. And I certainly wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the reasons the content was cut for the entirety of Europe (there's a big period of my childhood where all I heard about was Dunblane, then the occasional sick joke about the massacre, which wasn't quite as common back then as it is now because you had to tell jokes about tragedies to a person's face rather than forward a text). It never clicked in my mind that it might have influenced decision to remove kids (I'd always assumed it was because of Germany's laws about video game violence), probably because I never played Fallout until around 2002 or 2003.

I really liked the talk in general. A lot of stuff that I'd never heard of (like the issues with Win95 certification, which is ridiculous), and it was nice to have some things that I'd read about getting fleshed out a bit more.
 
I still remember some german computer mags writing about Fallout as "Diablo with turn based combat." Back then, I didn't noticed how silly that was.
 
Tim mentioned some document by Chris Taylor that was all about why exactly Fallout is cool to play (the first reason was mega violence). He also said that this doc will be available for everyone to read. Would be nice to see it.
 
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