Fallout Co-creator Tim Cain Says Today's Games Suffer From Trying...

Games are bigger than ever—but are they really better?

Today's games have forgotten the lessons of history, according to veteran RPG developer and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain. In a YouTube video uploaded this week in response to a viewer who asked whether old games could offer any "lost wisdom" for today's game developers and designers, Cain responded with an emphatic "Yes."

Today's games, Cain said, suffer from an identity crisis: "They don't really know what they want to be," he explained. "They try to be everything to everyone: designed by committee, making a publisher happy, trying to guess what the largest demographic wants." Old games, he said, had a stronger focus—because they had no other choice.

When Cain says old games, he means old games. We're not talking about his work on the first Fallout here, which is already more than a quarter of a century old. Instead, Cain said we should hearken back to games from the '80s, when he started working in the games industry as a teen.

Computer hardware in the '80s was, obviously, less capable. And crucially, Cain said, there were no shared hardware and software standards, even as "games were being made for PC, for Apple, for Atari, for Commodore, for a wild assortment of consoles."

Game developers, meanwhile, were less specialized. Programmers were also artists and sound designers, working without documentation to figure out how to get games to run within the hardware constraints of the era.

"These games were really focused, because they had to be," Cain said.

The first lesson the games of today can learn from their early forebears, Cain said, is efficiency. The limited memory and processor capabilities of the '80s left programmers with such tight margins that they had to time the display of individual pixels down to the millisecond, or creatively juggle the values stored at specific memory locations.

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"It's not that you want to be efficient, or 'wouldn't it be cool if we were efficient,'" Cain said. "It was 'you write efficient code or your game doesn't work on the Atari console.'"

Source: PC Gamer