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Fallout 1 & 2's Lost Code Revived by a Hero Programmer on a Quest to Snapshot Everything

Tim Cain, the chief developer behind the original Fallout, recently expressed his disappointment with how things have turned out. loss of the initial development resources for Fallout When he departed from Interplay, he was instructed to erase all copies of initial versions as well as his meeting notes. It seems that Interplay subsequently misplaced both the source code and the original Fallout artworks along with the clay models used for generating the 3D speaking heads featured in certain NPC characters.

Luckily, it transpired that Rebecca Heineman, one of the co-founders of Interplay and the lead programmer, retained copies of the source code for Fallout 1 and 2, as she mentioned. VideoGamer .

In 1993, Interplay released a CD featuring one game from each of the preceding ten years that they had published, which included titles like Battle Chess, Bard’s Tale, The Lord of the Rings Vol. I, and the initial installment of Wasteland. Heineman assembled this collection utilizing her personal copies of the source codes for these games, with the exception of Wasteland. Upon searching for it, she found out that many people were not making sufficient efforts towards backing up their work.

As she recounted, "When I requested the source code, all I got was a blank look. So, I headed to the COO's office where he handed me a beaten-up cardboard box that seemed as though it had been run over by a vehicle. Inside were some remnants of the source code stored on floppy disks. Ultimately, I reached out to my contacts at Electronic Arts to obtain a version of the source code we'd originally provided when Wasteland was released."

Afterward, Heineman started taking pictures of the code for every game she developed at Interplay, along with those she adapted for MacPlay—initially a segment of Interplay that later became an independent entity through licensing.

Heineman stated that he turned it into a mission to document everything and store it on CD-ROMs. Upon leaving Interplay in 1995, he possessed duplicates of all the games they produced—no exclusions applied. During his time with MacPlay, which continued after his period at Interplay, he captured snapshots of each game they ported, including Fallout 1 and 2.

Heineman previously made the source code for the 3DO edition of Doom Freely accessible on Github. She mentioned, "Since I created the code, I granted myself access, and when I reached out to id Software, they responded with an enthusiastic 'Of course!'. For Fallout, however, we'd need approval from Bethesda. I haven’t had the chance to contact them yet; they’re next on my list."

Considering that Bethesda is presently embarked on a goodwill tour with the remaster of Oblivion, even offering shout-outs to the modders contributing to Skyblivion It would certainly be great to see them approve the permanent preservation of these two influential role-playing games.

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