Tim Cain

Timothy Cain is an American video game developer best known as the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of the 1997 video game Fallout. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

Early life
Cain went to college at the University of Virginia and to graduate school in California. During this time, he helped out a friend programming a card game named Grand Slam Bridge for CYBRON Corporation which was released in 1986. In 1989, he received a Master's Degree in Computer Science at University of California, Irvine.

Interplay Entertainment
In 1994 he started for a couple of months as the only employee working on a game that would later become the post-apocalyptic RPG game Fallout. He laid out the basic concept based on the GURPS system and began programming the isometric game engine. He also took over the producer role from Thomas R. Decker who had to supervise multiple other projects at the time. With a development cycle of three and a half years Fallout was released in 1997. During this time he was also a programming consultant on Stonekeep (1995) and helped out coding Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (1997).

In an interview he criticized the bigger influence from sales/marketing department during Fallout 2 development, saying, "We were losing part of the game to a larger group who had bigger plans for it." Cain corroborated further in May 2023 that he left the company bitter after he was forced to work on Fallout 2 and did not get the bonus pay that was agreed upon after completion of the first game.

Troika Games


His next game reunited him with Thomas R. Decker, the original Fallout producer. As project leader and lead designer he produced within 20 months the Dungeons & Dragons game The Temple of Elemental Evil for publisher Atari in 2003. While he loved making the game he was disappointed that it did not turn out what he wanted it to be.

After Bethesda secured the Fallout license from Interplay in 2004, Cain expressed disappointment.

"I was hoping that Troika would get the license, but we were massively outbid. But in the end, they made a good game."

Cain had mixed reactions to Fallout 3, praising Bethesda's understanding of Fallout lore as well as the adaptation of "S. P. E. C. I. A. L." system into a FPS-RPG, but criticized the humor and recycling of too many story elements from the earlier Fallout games.

He helped out programming the last Troika game, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, a horror RPG for Activision in 2004. He also worked on a post-apocalyptic roleplay game for which he couldn't convince any publisher to fund. As consequence he had to lay off most employees in late 2004 and shut down Troika Games in February 2005.

Carbine Studios
He joined as the programming director at Carbine Studios working on a fantasy MMO game for NCSoft. He was promoted to design director in October 2007. Cain left Carbine Studios in July 2011.

Obsidian Entertainment
In 2011, Tim Cain joined Obsidian Entertainment as senior programmer. He worked on Pillars of Eternity, which was funded through Kickstarter. He was also a co-director for The Outer Worlds. Since June 2020, Cain is no longer employed by Obsidian as a full time employee, but still works for them on the sequel to The Outer Worlds as well as for two other companies on a contract basis.

Personal life
Cain is affected by hereditary color blindness, stating in a Gamasutra interview that he "[can now] see less than half the spectrum of colors". He enjoys cooking, particularly Japanese and Chinese cuisine, and his favorite dishes are garlic chicken fried rice and chicken karaage. Cain came out as a gay man in the early 2000s after concealing his sexuality throughout much of his early career. He married his husband Robert Land on July 14, 2011.