The original Fallout's lead developer Tim Cain has been sharing his memories about the early games in the series for a while over on his Youtube channel. Cain's had a long and eclectic career (the only sequel he's ever worked on, funnily enough, is Fallout 2) and also seems to have a razor-sharp memory for details and discussions that happened decades ago. His latest video concerns the specific dating of Fallout, which is set in Southern California in 2161, 84 years after a nuclear war between China and the US devastated the globe.
Cain begins with the quietly stunning revelation that Interplay threatened to sue him after he left the company, as a result of which he destroyed a treasure trove of the earliest Fallout material, from notes on concept meetings to various builds. This certainly tracks with what we already know about Interplay in the early 2000s, which was a legally aggressive and rapacious company (it tried to bully Valve at one point: Valve annihilated them thanks to one hero intern). And clearly Cain just didn't want the hassle of that kind of fight from his old employers.
