Tim Cain says he worked 70+ hour weeks on original Fallout because they loved it

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain said in a video on his official YouTube channel that he and his team at Interplay regularly worked more than 70 hours a week while making the original Fallout.

Cain described a typical day as waking around 6am, feeding his cat, then arriving at the office between 7 and 8am. He said he would bring cinnamon bread he'd made the night before; co-workers would inevitably eat it, and he left the recipe in the video's comments.

Addressing concerns about crunch, Cain acknowledged some viewers might call those hours "crunch" or "abuse," but he stressed it wasn't imposed by management. "No one was telling us to do this. We wanted to do it, we loved what we were doing, and we loved what we were making," he said in the video.

Cain also said he is not on-board with crunch culture as it exists in 2026 and that he is "glad things have changed." He called the schedule "unsustainable," while also describing the experience as "absolutely incredible."

What remains unclear is how to reconcile Cain's account of voluntary, passion-driven overtime with ongoing debates about crunch in modern game development; Cain framed his story as born of love for the project rather than managerial pressure.

tim cain, tim cain youtube video, fallout, original fallout, interplay entertainment, 70+ hour weeks, working 70 hours, voluntary overtime, passion-driven overtime, crunch culture 2026, game development crunch, unsustainable schedule, cinnamon bread recipe, bread recipe comments, co-creator of fallout, no managerial pressure, not making more new ips, feeding his cat, overtime debate, bethesda