Fallout's origin can be traced back to a pizza party Tim Cain threw

In the mid-1990s Interplay Entertainment acquired the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and would go on to publish Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale. The team working on a little post-apocalyptic RPG that would eventually be called Fallout was largely left to its own devices in the shadow of those projects, which turned out to be for the best.Why did this group come together in the first place? Because Fallout’s co-creator Tim Cain lured them in with a pizza party.Talking to Game Informer for an oral history of Fallout, Tim Cain related the story. His actual job was to program the installers for games, but he’d made a sprite engine in his spare time. He wasn’t allowed to approach people assigned to existing projects with it, however. “So, what I did was I reserved a conference room for 6 p.m.,” Cain explained, “which was when everybody was supposed to go home, and then I sent emails saying, ‘I’ll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine.'”I really thought that tons of people were going to show up, but I think it was about eight people showed up. And I didn’t realize at the time, but I was self-selecting for go-getters, and Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout’s art director] was somebody who came.”Since there were so many fantasy RPGs in the works at Interplay and elsewhere at the time, they decided to make a science-fiction…

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