Fallout co-creator says spaghetti code stems from time pressure, not laziness

Fallout co-creator Timothy Cain said in a new YouTube video that unreadable "spaghetti code" in games happens when developers aren't given enough time, not because they're "stupid, lazy programmers," Gamesradar reported.

Cain, a former Interplay developer, illustrated the point with an example he called real rather than hypothetical: a routine he described as "'Item armor get DR' looks at what armor they're wearing...gets the DR off it, and returns it," followed by successive changes that led to an inventory UI designer complaining the UI was wrong. "Basically this is where spaghetti-fication begins," Cain said, and added that "games are not products. They are as much art as they are product."

He said he'd "love to tell you this was hypothetical. It's not," and expressed relief that his RPGs are remembered as "flawed masterpieces" rather than "very buggy games." Cain also warned that adding more features will always make other parts of a game worse and said this is a point he's had to explain "since the beginning in the '80s to now."

Key Topics

Tech, Timothy Cain, Fallout, Interplay, Spaghetti Code, Inventory Ui