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Fallout 1 & 2 Source Code Preserved Only Through One Person Refusing To Delete Copies Of It
from the phew dept
It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it’s simply a fact that there is a massive and historical headwind they’re facing. For a long, long time these companies essentially zeroed out any concern about preserving their work in favor of copyright enforcement coupled with a disinterest in their side of the copyright equation.
We’ve already seen how the ability to legitimately buy some games, such as No One Lives Forever, has been blocked for over a decade over a jumble of potential intellectual property concerns. But the story of the source code for two absolute classic games, Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and how it almost became completely lost in the ether is a great example of the interest deficit in preservation going back years.
In April, Fallout creator Tim Cain explained that when he left Interplay in 1998 he was ordered to destroy any game assets or code he was holding onto that didn’t belong to him. This included the source code for the OG Fallout. Cain complied, which made it awkward when Interplay called a few years later asking if he had Fallout’s source code still. He thought it was a trap; turns out, Interplay had actually lost the code for it and Fallout 2. And Cain had assumed that due to Interplay’s “destroy it all” policy, the source code for the old RPGs were lost and destroyed. Thankfully, that’s not the case.
On May 5, Videogamer reported that it had heard from Interplay founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman that she had the source code for both Fallout and its sequel, as well as many other Interplay classics. She started preserving every Interplay game after working on the studio’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection and realizing how poorly the company’s past work was being saved for the future.
As Kotaku goes on to note, Heineman received the same order to destroy any copies of any source code she may have made or face litigation as well. She simply chose to ignore that demand. No lawsuit was ever filed and Heineman has indicated she kept her copies because she believed any lawsuit from Interplay would be doomed to fail.
And it’s a damned good thing she did. It appears hers is the only copy of the source code for both of these games. And it should cause all of us who care about game preservation to shiver to our spine that the same company that demanded all copies of source code by deleted couldn’t be bothered to secure the master copy itself. What if Heineman had followed orders like a good soldier? The code would simply be lost to the world, gone forever.
And before anyone thinks otherwise, no, Heineman isn’t some bad actor simply looking to defy all the rules without any deference to corporate interests.
As for why Heineman hasn’t released the code to the internet, she says that could only happen with permission from Bethesda (now the owners of Fallout) as they are still selling Fallout and Fallout 2 today.
“I need expressed permission to release, despite the source code being pretty much obsolete,” said Heineman. “I [haven’t] gotten around to asking them. They are on my list.” She is a busy woman, working on bringing back MacPlay and porting more games to Mac. But hopefully, when she does ask, Bethesda is cool with her sharing these important pieces of game history online.
Yes, hopefully. Otherwise we may be back at this all over again in the future.
Filed Under: archives, fallout, preservation, source code, video game preservation, video games
Companies: bethesda, interplay
Comments on “Fallout 1 & 2 Source Code Preserved Only Through One Person Refusing To Delete Copies Of It”
Wasn’t expecting Rebecca Heineman’s name to appear on this blog. She’s a peach.
If you have time I highly recommend checking out her video on her experience developing 3DO Doom, it’s equal parts hilarious and mortifying.
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between the source code of a game and the code/assets/etc that run when you’re playing a copy of a game?
Is it possible to dismantle a retail copy of a game in order to get the code used to make it work, or is it like…dunno, having the answer to an equation without knowing exactly what x and y were added together to get it?
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Assets are graphics/audio/sound/3d model/etc
watch the lego island decomp video
tldw: take a cake and trying and work out the recipe by taste alone
Re: It depends (doesn't it always)
For source code vs code/assets/etc … the oldest games had the assets baked into the code as data blocks, so the assets are in the source code. Later games used separate resource files, loaded at run-time, so, as always, it depends upon how the developers managed those assets as to whether they’re kept with the code, or managed separately.
Regarding getting the source code back from the retail copy … for some languages (eg. Java), it is possible to de-compile them. But few mainstream games (OG Minecraft being a notable exception) are written in Java. Most are written in C or C++. In which case, I wouldn’t put money on de-compilation giving you meaningful, understandable, readable answers as to the original source code.
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The way most programming languages work, you have to compile to code to turn it into something the computer can understand. If you strip out all the assets, you’ll be left with this machine code, not the original source code.
In some cases, it is possible to decompile this back into code in the appropriate language, but this won’t be the same as the original code – any comments by the programmer will be missing, names for the data storing variables will be generic, and some code will be different.
The machine code is readable if you know what you’re doing (modifications to old console games, like the original Nintendo are done this way), but it’s complex and not easy to work with.
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Unfortunately not quite. Large parts of games are often dynamically linked, but not dynamically compiled, meaning that while we can reverse engineer bits here and there, the original source code remains a mystery.
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So there are a few components.
First you have the game written is some type of programming language like c++ which then is compiled and turned into machine code /cpu instructions.
So in order to reverse that you would have to know both the compiler version, settings, and possibly more.
To go with your equation example it would be more like trying to figure out the word problem that the equation was for from the equation alone.
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BETHESDA is the microsoft of games.
Sure, she hasn’t reached out.
I’d love to help her negotiate a deal.
Buthesda are assholes.
There is your “deal.” Not going to happen. Bethesda lawyers you are familiar with what to do.
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As someone who was directly given permission to publish fanfic based on Zenimax Media games (as long as the stories are non-commercial, or I would have to apply for a license), I reject that assertion, which is clearly nothing more than (deliberately?) uninformed opinion.
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You’re talking about ideas, which are not supposed to be eligible for copyright in the first place, despite a history of courts ignoring that rule. So you got permission—with significant restrictions—to do something that shouldn’t have ever been subject to permission at all.
We can infer that they’re not total assholes (and, for all I know, maybe they’re not assholes at all), but I don’t think this evidence refutes the original assertion entirely.
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So publishing a Fallout fanfic under the Fallout name doesn’t involve any trademarks, a form of IP? I don’t think so, chump.
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The previous comment didn’t need to, it was your assumption that permission is required only for copyrighted works, and besides, many fanfics also require use of copyrighted elements from the original works, including characters. As for points 2 and 3, many courts have found against anyone relying on Fair Use/Dealing exemptions if they didn’t first make a good faith attempt to reach out to the IP holder, so its always a good idea to first reach out, and only then publish after waiting for a couple of weeks after attempting contact (if the company doesn’t seem to be getting back to you).
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Well done on calling Rebecca Heineman a liar without admitting you’re calling her a liar despite ignoring all of the facts outlined in the article.
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I mean…Bethesda is Microsoft, so I guess they’re kind of the Microsoft of everything.
When you consider how Disney has profited by re-releasing 50 year old movies, and even game companies have gotten great sales from modernized editions of their games, you’d think more effort would be put into preservation as a future profit stream. Sadly, the majority of entertainment companies in all media from movies to music to computer games are notorious for just tossing things and poorly storing them even when they do elect to maintain an archive.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and the success of the Oblivion remaster will open some eyes to the benefits of preservation. But more likely is that the original Oblivion will now disappear.
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I still have my copy from GOG. And on GOG, the original Resident Evil 1-3 games are there, so…
That’s when you set up a dead man’s trigger. They can’t sue you once you’re dead and gone! Set up your own mail server to send (a link to) the contents off to everyone you can think of who might be interested after, say, one full calendar year without a keepalive.
This works well for all manner of things.
Kudos to her for ignoring the baseless legal threats and delivering the source code. I just wish we could live in a world where it didn’t take so much boldness to preserve culture
Require deposits with the Library of Congress
It’s a pity that we no longer enforce the rule that you have to deposit a copy of anything you register copyright on with the Library of Congress, to ensure that the “becomes part of the public domain” part of the bargain actually happens. That would definitely fix the “shows on streaming services” problem and could fix this issue too, with appropriate regulations.
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Specifically, to require a copy of the source code and assets for a game/software to be registered for copyright, not just the compiled executable for soon to be obsolete hardware and operating systems.
In other words, needs to be fully reproducible in working order in the future when the copyright term expires.
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Only if copyright registration were also made mandatory again. (Fallout was registered, with registration number PA0000886144 and the interesting note “Printout (1 v.) also deposited.”)
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…in the very distant future, assuming the Library can properly manage the data and make it available. Streaming became popular around 2010, and the corporate copyright term is 95 years from publication in the USA, so…
Sometime after the year 2100, when the actors and most of us are dead, maybe people will be able to watch shows such as Breaking Bad via the LoC. Or, you know, you could just watch the “iNGOT” version now.
In other words, the problem’s solved, and some people just aren’t yet willing to admit it. We’ve got a “preservation program” that’s been working for 30 years, and we’ve got a purely hypothetical and unfunded Library of Congress program. Which do you think will make it to the next century? I think we’ll be lucky if the LoC survives the current presidency; as with Heineman, we may have to recover certain data from ex-employees who ignored orders.
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A. Coward said: “assuming the Library can properly manage the data and make it available.”
The Library managers billions of pieces of digital materials, including born-digital materials. There is no organization on earth more knowledgable about digital preservation.
And if they failed, a lot of what would be lost would be far more valuable than video games.
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Knowledge of preservation is only part of what they need. They also need budget, which is unlikely to happen in the next few years. And they need to be able to distribute stuff in a useful way. I think most of their stuff can only be accessed by going to Capitol Hill, and dealing with security-checkpoint bullshit. Apparently, they do distribute a few things online, but have you ever accessed anything via them? I can’t recall doing so.
I’ve gotten stuff via archive.org, Project Gutenberg, Library Genesis, aXXo… but somehow never this organization that’s the best-funded library system on Earth (by far), with either the first- or second-biggest collection. Except that I think I have read some of their information on file formats—yeah, they are knowledgeable.
Anyway, if we passed a deposit law as proposed, it’d be almost a century before we found out whether the deposits they took were actually useful for the public. What does the hypothetical person of the year 2093 do when they find out the deposited Fallout 1 code was missing a header file, or that some asset depends on a proprietary program whose copyright was never registered and has hence not been archived itself?
I watched an interview with John Romero awhile back where (IIRC) he mentioned that Bethesda had scolded him for sharing Doom development documentation that he’d kept, but then later they came to him and asked him if he could get them copies because they didn’t have any.
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Note they didn’t order him to destroy it, only told him off for the copyright violation. Nice spin there. Would you like a career in politics?