Tim Cain reveals his involvement in the cancellation of Interplay's Fallout 3: 'I don't think it would have been a game you would have liked playing'

The original isometric Fallout games were developed by Black Isle Studios in the 1990s, after which the series went on a longer-than-expected hiatus. Publisher Interplay was not having a good time of it in the early 2000s, and one of the projects causing it trouble was the next mainline Fallout game: codenamed Project Van Buren, but for all intents and purposes, Fallout 3. 

Tim Cain, producer on the original Fallout, has in recent years been posting YouTube videos in which he reminisces about the Black Isle days and some of the defining games he and others worked on. Cain's latest video focuses on Project Van Buren, though he wasn't at Interplay at the time: Cain had left Interplay to co-found Troika Games (best-known for Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines). 

Cain begins by praising a video he recently watched on Project van Buren, before adding that it was missing one detail: his «involvement in its cancellation.» Cain kept in touch with old colleagues, and an Interplay VP who he leaves nameless («We got on well… he had a 10 charisma») asked the designer to take a look at one of their projects… but not in a good way. 

Cain begins by recalling the conversation with the vice president. They said something along the lines of, «Would you mind coming over and playing one of our game prototypes? We're making a Fallout game and I'm going to have to cancel it. I don't think they can get it done… So I'm just gonna cancel it, but if you could come over and look at it and give me an estimate, there's a chance I wouldn't cancel it.»

Having a look, recalls Cain, was a matter of going «across the street into Interplay's lobby», feeling that he should help out. This was not least because his Interplay acquaintance knew how to press his buttons: «If you don't do it, bad things will happen to other people.»

Cain played a build of Project van Buren for «a while…. probably two hours» that, he says, was more-or-less identical to the tech demo leaked in 2007, and from which most