Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Ted Litchfield

We owe Fallout's existence to an admiral and his officers teaching its designer to play D&D in 1979

Male and Female Vault Dweller holding guns and cresting a hill with ruined city in background.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, RPG veteran and Fallout Designer Tim Cain talked about the first time he was ever exposed to Dungeons & Dragons, a pivotal influence on the developer: Some of his mother's coworkers showed him the ropes all the way back in the Carter administration. Oh, and they happened to be high-ranking US naval officers.

"If you started playing D&D on a computer, where there's no DM, the computer handles it all, … you don't have to learn how to run the rules," Cain said, contrasting his experience of learning D&D from first principles with how the game now informs so many assumptions about gaming and role playing.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.