Recently, Tim Cain, the creator of the original Fallout, spoke with Game Informer and once again recalled the story of the first presentation of his engine, which he had already told in one of his blogs.
In the 90s at Interplay, Cain was developing installers for games, and in his free time he experimented with engines:
I made a sprite engine and showed it to Leonard [Boyarsky] and a few other people. We thought, "You could make a game with this." However, at that time I had no assigned tasks, and I was not allowed to address them, because everyone was working on other projects.
Then Tim Cain had an idea how to attract attention to his idea and formally not violate the rules.
He decided to hold a secret presentation in the evening, when everyone usually left:
I booked a meeting room for 6 pm — when everyone usually went home — and sent out an email: "I'll be in this room with pizza, if you want to come and talk about what games we could make on such a sprite isometric engine."
Tim Cain expected a lot of people to come, but in fact about eight people came:
Then I didn't realize that in this way I gathered active and proactive people — Leonard was among them.
Then the developers came to the decision to use Tim Cain's sprite engine instead of full 3D graphics.
Leonard Boyarsky recalls:
We were discussing what we were going to do, I — as an art director — although I thought that using 3D would be cool, I understood that it was not yet possible to achieve high detail in 3D. Therefore, we decided to use the sprite engine that he already had.