Fallout 1 lead Tim Cain says the marketing department wanted him to make it real-time 'because of Diablo,' but he got them to back off when he told them how much it would cost

In a new vlog on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer and Fallout 1 lead Tim Cain shared one of those great "told you so" anecdotes of gaming history: Interplay's marketing department apparently hounded Cain to rebuild Fallout to be more like Diablo, rather than the turn-based RPG we got.

A viewer asked Cain what he would have done to make Fallout 1 work as more of a real-time, actionized experience, to which Cain replied, "I would not have made Fallout real-time. Not back in '97, not today in 2025."

Real-Time Fallout - YouTube

Watch On

But Cain revealed he was pressured to do just that, and also shared his "what-if" theorycrafting on what real-time Fallout 1 would have looked like had the pressure campaign actually succeeded, as well as the design choices he would make now, were he forced to revamp Fallout 1 in such a way.

"Interplay marketing approached me in 1996, a year before we came out, and they wanted Fallout to be made real-time because of Diablo," Cain said. "The way I finally got it to stop was just by pointing out how much money I would need, and time, and they finally stopped."

This pressure is really interesting in the context of RPGs at the time: Diablo's explosive success kind of poisoned the well for top-down CRPGs for a while.

Money (or marketing) types in the industry would look at games with a similar art style and perspective to Diablo and say, "Oh, is this like Diablo? It isn't? Well why the hell not?"

It's a similar story to many follow-the-leader design fads in gaming, with recent examples including Destiny-style live service, battle royale, and extraction shooters.

One notable instance of a studio burned by the Diabloification drive was Larian, whose first released game, Divine Divinity, saw its gameplay actionized in the face of publisher pressure.

Diablo itself was famously going to be turn-based before pivoting to real-time and creating the action RPG, but that change came only six months into its development.

The time and expense a Fallout retrofit of this nature would have required at the end of 1996/beginning of '97 when Diablo came out, so far into the development of Fallout 1, surely wouldn't have gone as smoothly. The patent absurdity of the request at such a late stage appears to have ensured its downfall, thankfully.

But Cain indulged us in a bit of theorycrafting, both in terms of what real-time Fallout might have looked like back in '97, as well as how he would (reluctantly) go about it now. Cain's next game, the cultiest of cult hits, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, gives us an idea of how real-time Fallout might have functioned in the late '90s.

Cain and fellow Fallout devs Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left to form their own studio, Troika, and released this phenomenal Steampunk RPG in 2001. Its combat plays almost exactly like 2D Fallout, despite the radical change in setting, but also has a toggleable real-time combat mode.

I love this game almost as much as my cat, but its real-time mode is not a good time, serving best as a sort of JRPG-on-an-emulator fast-forward mode for trash mobs and grinding. Cain saying real-time Fallout 1 would have played like Arcanum feels like a threat.

As an alternative, Cain explained some of the changes he had in mind to make a real-time Fallout 1 retrofit work, knowing what he does now:

• No action points, with Agility and different attacks instead tying into attack speed and MMO-style cooldowns.
• A VATS or bullet time-style system for aiming called shots on enemies' specific limbs.
• Make healing items work over time, instead of instantaneously.
• Rework most, if not all the perks in the game to accommodate the new system, with special attention paid to ones that reference or change action points.

Even with all that proposed bespoke balancing, I don't think we'd wind up with a game that's better than, or even as good as the Fallout 1 we got. That's a point Cain echoes one final time at the end of the video: "I think that's everything I would do to change Fallout to real-time. I would never do it. But if I had to do it, that's what I would do."