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Dustin Bailey

16 September 2025

“Dude, get out more”

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(Image credit: Troika Games)

Video games are a time-consuming hobby, and an even more time-consuming profession. You can’t expect a gamer to stay up on pop culture when there are 100-hour RPGs to enjoy, right? Well, some of us can at least take comfort in the fact that we’re not quite as out-of-touch as original Fallout lead Tim Cain, who at one point was so wrapped up in the game development rabbit hole that he thought Britney Spears was a weapon somebody had added to his new RPG.

“There was a 10-year period where I didn’t do anything but make games,” Cain explains in an interview for YouTube channel The Vile Eye. “In most of the 90s and the early 2000s, I would go to work almost every day and work on a game. On the weekends, I might play a game,” and then he’d be back to work making RPGs again.
During that period, Cain created the original concept for Fallout, led its development, helped build the sequel, and co-founded a new studio in Troika Games. By the time of Troika’s first release, the cult classic steampunk RPG Arcanum, Cain had clearly fully checked out of pop culture.

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A Very Vile Interview: Tim Cain Of Fallout Fame – YouTube

“Somebody once said to me, ‘What do you think of Britney Spears?'” Cain recalls. “And I literally – I was not joking – I turned to him like, ‘Is that a new weapon in our game?’ This is during Arcanum, and his name was Jesse Reynolds. He just looked at me and went, ‘Dude, get out more.'”

Troika was founded in 1998, and Arcanum launched in 2001, which aligns more or less perfectly with the rise of Britney Spears as one of the biggest pop megastars of all time. Tracks like …Baby One More Time, Oops!… I Did It Again, and I’m a Slave 4 U all started their endless loops on the radio and MTV in that period, but I guess they weren’t completely inescapable.
“I thought maybe it’s like ‘Britney’ is part of Britain or something,” Cain explains. “Like it’s a type of spear. It’s like, ‘Here’s an Ethiopian dagger, here’s a Britney spear.’ I was like ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!'”
Tim Cain acknowledges Bethesda made the Fallout franchise bigger, but he would have done things differently: “Did they expand it the way I would have? No, not at all, that’s OK.”

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Dustin Bailey

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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Fallout co-creator Tim Cain acknowledges Bethesda made the franchise bigger, but he would have done things differently: “Did they expand it the way I would have? No, not at all, that’s OK”

After revealing he was ordered to destroy his copy of Fallout’s source code, OG lead Tim Cain says we’re losing game history because companies “take authority but not responsibility” for preservation

Fallout “was a sequel” to Wasteland, says Interplay co-founder, and “we did everything we could not to be sued by Electronic Arts” after the devs “had to pivot out” of the follow-up

Todd Howard told Bethesda designers that “humor has no place in games,” a rule they didn’t follow in RPGs like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Morrowind: “If Todd doesn’t catch it…”

Nearly 30 years ago, an RPG veteran walked away from Fallout 2 after just a few conversations – with The Outer Worlds 2, he’s finally “doing a sequel to a game that I created the IP for”

Former Bethesda exec Pete Hines “hated the confusion” around The Elder Scrolls studio “making a new game, and everybody thinking, ‘Oh, it’s Todd Howard’s team'”

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