Original Fallout co-creator finally explains what made him leave the sequel: 'I made an IP from scratch that nobody believed in except the team, and my reward for that was more crunch'

pcgamer.com:

Veteran RPG creator Tim Cain has continued his campaign to pull back the curtain on CRPG history through a series of quite lovely and informative blogs on YouTube. Yesterday, he hit us with the surprising reveal that the original Fallout, which Cain co-created, was a low priority «B-tier» project for publisher Interplay during much of its development, and that video serves as background for today's topic: why Cain and fellow developers Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left the development of Fallout 2 before its release.

To recap, Tim Cain is a veteran RPG developer, having worked at Interplay, Troika, and Obsidian on games like Fallout, Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity, and the more recent Outer Worlds. From a state of semi-retirement, he's been vlogging about various untold stories from his career like the original lore purpose of Fallout's vaults or an AI-focused retrofit of his underappreciated D&D game, The Temple of Elemental Evil, for use by the United States Department of Defense.

The departure of Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson from Interplay to form their own RPG studio is one of those mythical bits of RPG lore at this point, a historical hinge point mused on by weirdos like me. In a lot of ways, Troika's first game Arcanum feels like an alternate Fallout 2, a divergent evolutionary path for a lot of the same ideas.

According to Cain, Fallout 1 being a low priority for Interplay initially was a blessing in disguise for him and the team—it led to a lack of oversight and an amount of creative freedom the developers would come to long for later. Cain describes taking on a lot of first-time developers, as well as so-called «problem employees» that hadn't thrived at Interplay.

Things began