Gaming: Fallout Lead Tim Cain Worked 70+ Hours A Week For 2 Years To Make...

"I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark."

In a new video on his YouTube channel, prolific RPG developer Tim Cain broke down what his average daily schedule looked like while working on the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment. Along the way, he reflected on the grueling pace of work he took on, and why it felt more acceptable in 1995.

Cain sets the composite average day in '95, about a year into development. This is distinct from the irregular preproduction work that came before, as well as the even more blistering, seven days a week schedule he kept during the game's final stretch in 1997.

Cain would wake up at 6:00 AM, take care of his cat, then reach the office by 7:00⁠—homemade loaf of bread in hand⁠, recipe helpfully under the video's top comment—to get an early start on coding tasks when there were no meetings to interrupt him. Cain would check in with members of the team at midmorning, excepting the ones who requested to be left alone.

Cain's lunch habits⁠—he would return home to make something each day⁠—touch on an economic reality that makes me wish I was born 20 years earlier. He was living paycheck to paycheck, and so largely avoided eating out… in order to pay off the mortgage he took on a house in Southern California. Not to take anything from Cain's fiscal discipline and hard work, but these days in the games industry, you're probably feeling the same squeeze sans property ownership.

One fun tidbit regarding that house: Fallout assistant producer Fred Hatch rented a room from Cain for much of the game's development. "I need a little extra money … and he needed a place. So it worked out great for both of us."

Cain would stay until 7:00 or 7:30 in the evening after lunch, coding for Fallout if he could, but more often getting called to meetings with other producers or departments at Interplay. He would eventually share much of this burden, including mandatory project reports, with Hatch. "I don't know who read them," said Cain. "I suspect sometimes they weren't read, because sometimes they had questions in them and the questions never got answered. But the reports got written."

"I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark," Cain said of these 12+ hour work days. At night, he would eat, compile detailed notes on Fallout's progress and the day's events⁠—part of how he's able to make such comprehensive videos about this time in his life—then be in bed by 10:00 PM.

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Source: PC Gamer