Original Fallout source code survived thanks to "rogue" Interplay co-founder

Whew: A week after Fallout co-creator Tim Cain revealed that Interplay had ordered him to destroy the game's and its sequel's source code in the late 1990s, new information shows it survived. One of the company's co-founders quietly preserved it decades ago, preserving important gaming history. Rebecca Heineman, a veteran programmer and co-founder of Interplay, told VideoGamer that she made personal backups of Fallout and Fallout 2 while working on Mac ports of the games. Her habit of creating archival CD-ROMs stemmed from an earlier failed attempt to recover the source code for Wasteland – the 1988 Interplay pre-cursor to Fallout – which taught her the importance of preservation. This early lesson in safeguarding digital history became a driving force behind her decision to keep backups of all her work, ensuring that nothing of value would be lost. "I made it a quest to snapshot everything I worked on just in case this very situation happened," Heineman said. "When I left Interplay ... Read full article.