Tim Cain says THAC0 knowledge helped him get hired at Interplay

Tim Cain is widely regarded among PC RPG fans and has credits on games such as Stonekeep, Fallout, Arcanum, ToEE and Pillars of Eternity. In a recent video he traced the start of that career to one moment where he out‑nerded another candidate. Cain played a lot of tabletop RPGs, carrying a love of D&D through college and into his PhD.

GURPS became important later—originally intended as Fallout’s ruleset before licensing issues led to the creation of SPECIAL—but an older D&D system also proved pivotal, enjoying a last hurrah in the original Baldur’s Gate games and helping Cain land the job. He says Interplay was choosing between him and another programmer who were about equal in coding skill.

Cain could explain THAC0—“to hit armor class zero”—and offered to provide the level‑one THAC0 values for the four major D&D classes: fighter, magic user, thief and cleric. After being hired he ran tabletop nights where GURPS dominated because it supports many settings.

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