OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains just how much thought went into the timeline, and why canned beans were key: 'Post-apocalypse, but not so far post- that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead'

pcgamer.com:

The original Fallout's lead developer Tim Cain has been sharing his memories about the early games in the series for a while over on his Youtube channel. Cain's had a long and eclectic career (the only sequel he's ever worked on, funnily enough, is Fallout 2) and also seems to have a razor-sharp memory for details and discussions that happened decades ago. His latest video concerns the specific dating of Fallout, which is set in Southern California in 2161, 84 years after a nuclear war between China and the US devastated the globe.

Cain begins with the quietly stunning revelation that Interplay threatened to sue him after he left the company, as a result of which he destroyed a treasure trove of the earliest Fallout material, from notes on concept meetings to various builds. This certainly tracks with what we already know about Interplay in the early 2000s, which was a legally aggressive and rapacious company (it tried to bully Valve at one point: Valve annihilated them thanks to one hero intern). And clearly Cain just didn't want the hassle of that kind of fight from his old employers.

«I remember taking notes but I have gone through everything, I've even digitised my handwritten notes that I had at home [but] it was probably destroyed because Interplay threatened me with a lawsuit after I left,» says Cain. «So I destroyed all the stuff I had at home, I took a CD that had Fallout code, journal code, it had the initial graphics library that I built it all from and it probably had digitised meeting notes on it: That thing is destroyed, it's done.»

Thanks for that one, Interplay (Cain does mention he wasn't the only person with access to certain of these documents, so who knows). But the subject today is the setting and specifically the timeline that Black Isle went for, and what that would mean for things that were going to be important for the game.

«I remember one of the first things we talked about was we didn't want anyone in the Vault to really know what was