The original source code for Interplay’s Fallout and its sequel Fallout 2 was thought lost and destroyed. But it turns out that at least one person defied orders from the studio and saved the source code behind two of the most popular PC RPGs ever made.
In April, Fallout creator Tim Cain explained that when he left Interplay in 1998 he was ordered to destroy any game assets or code he was holding onto that didn’t belong to him. This included the source code for the OG Fallout. Cain complied, which made it awkward when Interplay called a few years later asking if he had Fallout’s source code still. He thought it was a trap; turns out, Interplay had actually lost the code for it and Fallout 2. And Cain had assumed that due to Interplay’s “destroy it all” policy, the source code for the old RPGs were lost and destroyed. Thankfully, that’s not the case.
On May 5, Videogamer reported that it had heard from Interplay founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman that she had the source code for both Fallout and its sequel, as well as many other Interplay classics. She started preserving every Interplay game after working on the studio’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection and realizing how poorly the company’s past work was being saved for the future.
“I made it a quest to snapshot everything and archive it on CD-ROMs,” Heineman explained. “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 confirmed to Videogamer that Cain’s comments about Interplay demanding all employees who leave the studio destroy all assets or face possible “litigation” in the future was true. She just didn’t follow those orders. And while she doesn’t have Caine’s lost and destroyed design docs and notes, she does have the source code for Fallout and Fallout 2 safely secured on a high quality Blu-Ray disc.
“Interplay had a reputation of threatening ex-employees with litigation if they were ‘poached’, and if they had assets taken home,” she told the outlet. “However, they had no legal leg to stand on which was why a suit was never filed on anyone. [If] they did have a legal leg to stand on, I would have been sued into last week.”
As for why Heineman hasn’t released the code to the internet, she says that could only happen with permission from Bethesda (now the owners of Fallout) as they are still selling Fallout and Fallout 2 today.
“I need expressed permission to release, despite the source code being pretty much obsolete,” said Heineman. “I [haven’t] gotten around to asking them. They are on my list.” She is a busy woman, working on bringing back MacPlay and porting more games to Mac. But hopefully, when she does ask, Bethesda is cool with her sharing these important pieces of game history online.
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