Cain & Boyarsky Boys Meet Worlds
WITH THE OUTER WORLDS NOW OUT ON XBOX GAME PASS, OXM SITS DOWN WITH CO-DIRECTORS TIM CAIN AND LEONARD BOYARSKY TO CHAT ABOUT CREATING THE FALLOUT FRANCHISE, THEIR LOVE OF FUTURAMA AND MAKING COMEDY WORK IN GAMES
DAVE MEIKLEHAM
When it comes to partnerships in videogames, not many relationships span a truly whopping three decades. Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky are best known for helping create a little-known Vault 101-dwelling franchise you’ve probably heard of. We think it’s called Fall… out ? Yeah, that rings a bell. Yet before they teamed up to create an apocalyptic RPG that would go on to spawn a decades-long franchise, they first worked on a business simulator about the 1929 stock market crash. You heard us. Though neither Tim or Leonard were around for the launch of Fallout 3 on Xbox 360 – the first time the dystopian series hit a Microsoft console – they’re both still master RPG makers. Something they recently proved with the rather excellent The Outer Worlds . With the sci-fi quest happily finding a home on Xbox Game Pass thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of Obsidian (where the duo now work), now seems the perfect time to sit down and chat about their lovably daft RPG and the secret to the success of their 25-year creative partnership.
You guys have a storied legacy in the games industry, dating way back to the original Fallout in 1997. What was it like partnering up together on a project for the first time in so many years? How has your creative relationship grown and changed over your time together in the business?
Leonard: It was nice. What a great answer, right!? We obviously worked on the original Fallout and Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura together, so we had a lot of experience of generating ideas together. We have very different ways of viewing the world, and those two world views collide and combine very nicely to create the kind of tone that people seem to enjoy in our games. We really trust each other and we have these complementary skill sets. But if you ask Tim, because I don’t think I’ve ever asked him this before, what prompted you to have trust in me early on with Fallout?
Tim: Well, art-wise… I’ve got no sensibility whatsoever and I’m colour-blind… and then you started doing writing and it really resonated from a QA standpoint, and I’d meet with the head QA guy every morning and he’d tell me what people would like, and more often than not, it would be stuff that [you] the artist had done rather than the designer.
Leonard: We work so well together because we really understand what we’re good at and what we’re not good at. Sometimes,
