Fallout creator Tim Cain has continued his insightful video series on the development of the original Fallout game, this time focusing on lore with a number of fun reveals that have got fans talking.
Cain, the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of Interplay’s 1997 post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout, released a video in which he talked about lore in the original Fallout that the team assumed was true but was never directly stated.
This “non-expository Fallout lore,” as Cain calls it, is lore from the first game only, lore the original team discussed among themselves and decided was true, and then made the game based on that. “None of this was written down” by any one of the 15 core people who developed Fallout, Cain said.
As a result, it is “not canon.”
“This is stuff that was true in the first game, but because it doesn’t exist in a design document anywhere, Bethesda is free to invent different reasons that the things that are in the game exist,” he prefaced. “I’m not canon, not anymore. You’re not canon just because you played the game or like it a lot. Bethesda’s canon. You don’t have to like that. You don’t have to like that water’s wet. I don’t like that white chocolate exists, but it does. So there we go.”
Why China nuked first
Top of the list is the explanation for why China nuked first. This is in reference to Fallout’s Great War, which took place on October 23, 2077 (Bethesda now hosts showcases on October 23 each year, aka Fallout Day). Cain had already said China nuked first in a previous video, putting to bed decades of fan speculation. But in this latest video he explained why China nuked first.
“This is not canon, but let me explain what I mean and why we thought that,” he began. “In the original game we had established FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) and that the U.S. was doing bio-weapons research. We weren’t supposed to. In fact, we had signed a UN treaty saying we wouldn’t do that, and I think you can find that out in the game. China discovered that we were doing it. How did they discover it? Espionage. But they found out we were doing it, and we went, ‘Oops our bad, we won’t do that anymore.’ But we kept right on doing it, we just moved the research to another base. It was the hidden base that’s in The Glow, where you eventually discover ZAX the supercomputer.
“When China found out we were still doing it and we had just moved, well they had already tried diplomacy and espionage and none of that was working, so they just nuked us. They nuked us. We nuked back. Other countries nuked because all we saw, all anyone saw, were missiles flying.
“China technically started it by firing the first nuke. But you could argue that the U.S. technically started it by doing illegal bioweapons research and then lying about it multiple times.”
And what of Russia’s involvement? Cain went on to explain that the development team assumed Russia in the ‘90s (and therefore in the ‘50s projected future in the Fallout alternate history timeline), had broken up to become “a bunch of little bickering states.” The EU had unified, and the U.S. had annexed Canada (a prediction not lost on Cain given current events). “But anyway, we were kind of on friendly relations with Russia in the Fallout universe,” he added.
This is why one of Fallout’s pre-made characters is Natalia, the granddaughter of a Russian diplomat. “Obviously, we were friendly enough with the Russian embassy that they got some of their diplomats into one of the vaults, the vault you’re in,” Cain explained. “So, obviously, this wasn’t a country we were at odds with.”
The Vault 13 lottery
So, that explains the unspoken lore behind why China nuked first. But Cain had a lot more lore to reveal. It turns out that the three pre-made characters the player could choose from were in fact selected via a lottery by the inhabitants of Vault 13 — a lottery that was rigged.
“We had three pre-made characters in Fallout,” he went on. “There was Max, who was the big dumb idiot combat guy. There was Natalia, who was the dextrous thief kind of character. And then there was Albert, who was the smooth talking manipulator talkie guy.
“If you look at those three characters, you may go, that’s the best the vault had to offer? No, the vault did a lottery. They basically drew straws. They knew they had to send someone out. So they had people draw straws and whoever drew the short straw had to go out into what was presumed to be a radioactive wilderness that would kill them. But hopefully they would get back before the radiation killed them with a water chip replacement.
“This was just assumed. The pre-made characters support it. I believe there’s some dialogue here and here that kind of supports that no-one chose, especially if you play Max, no-one chose for that character to go. That wasn’t their first choice. That wasn’t even their best choice. That wouldn’t even been anywhere near the choice.
“Except one thing we also talked about and laughed about as also possibly being true was that the entire lottery for who leaves the vault was rigged. And that would explain those three characters. You have this guy who’s an idiot. Why would you send him out? Well, gets him out of the genepool. Then you have Natalia who’s stealing everything. Probably had pissed people off because she had stolen other people’s stuff. She’s gone. Albert was always trying to manipulate everybody because he’s such a smooth talker. He’s gone. So getting rid of these characters was probably high on someone’s list.”
Cain said that all this is hinted at by the corpse wearing a vault suit you see as soon as you step out of Vault 13 at the beginning of the game.
“They’d already sent someone out,” he said. “That also explains why they didn’t have much to give you. They probably had supplies for doing external exploration, maybe a radiation suit, maybe better weapons or whatever. But you’re not the first person they sent out. You have evidence of that the moment you step out. Whoever that guy was, I think we said his name was Ed, which means you knew him or you knew his name. Ed stepped out. Ed got attacked by rats. Ed died. All that’s left is Ed’s bones and a raggedy old vault suit. So, there’s evidence that yes, there was a lottery for and and you were not the first person sent out.”
Vault suits are 3D printed from a machine
Here’s a fun bit of ‘Non-Expository Fallout Lore’: the series’ iconic vault suits aren’t made of cloth, nor were they sewn together. There wasn’t a warehouse room full of them somewhere in the vault. Rather, vault suits were extruded. Yes, that’s right… the vaults had a machine that 3D prints the vault suits.
“I know this was something we had because one of the vault ideas we had was the vault suit extruder was broken, so everybody in the vault was naked,” Cain revealed.
“The reason, though, we wanted to do an extruder was first of all, that vault suit was skin tight. It was obviously highly tailored, but if this vault was supposed to be closed for hundreds of years, there’s no way you could have enough suits in there for everybody because there’d be multi-generations. Suits would wear out. People come in all shapes and sizes, especially if you throw kids into the mix. So, there was no way they could possibly stock vault suits for everybody, or even cloth to make all those suits for everybody.
“So, we just said, ‘Oh, there was some kind of extruder.’ You know, you typed in measurements, you stood in front of a scanner or whatever, and then a vault suit expressly for you was extruded. And that’s why they were all skin tight. That’s why they all had the numbers on the back. That way they didn’t have to make vault suits, a different vault suit for every single vault. When it extruded, it added your vault’s number on the back.
“So, we used to always assume that was going to be true, but then it never ever came up again. But if you do look in vaults, you never find, at least not in the base game, you never find boxes and boxes of vault suits.”
What the hell is Harold?
Next up is fan-favorite Fallout character Harold, a presumed unique FEV mutant who was once a sort of ghoul, but had become a sort of tree thing. Harold appeared in Fallout, Fallout 2, and even Bethesda’s Fallout 3, where he is worshipped as a deity at Oasis, but we’re never quite sure what he is or why he is in the state he’s in.
According to Cain, all the developers were trying to do with Harold was create a character who clearly wasn’t normal, someone who hinted at what might be possible beyond the confines of Fallout’s Southern California setting and all the horrible things that people were exposed to beyond the realm of the first game.
“People called him Harold the ghoul in the hub, but we didn’t necessarily agree that he was a ghoul,” Cain said. “I kind of thought he was a ghoul. Other people on the team thought he was FEV. Other people thought he was some mix of ghoul and FEV, even though FEV wasn’t supposed to work right on people who had been radiated.
“Harold was weird. That’s what we all agreed on. Harold was our example of, there’s some weird stuff out here. You want to see an example of that? Look at Harold. We don’t know what Harold is. Harold doesn’t know what he is.”
Why Sugar Bombs?
And finally, Sugar Bombs. For the uninitiated, Sugar Bombs are the Fallout franchise’s sugar-drenched cereal aimed at children despite being entirely unhealthy for anyone. Sugar Bombs didn’t actually make it into Interplay’s Fallout games, but were picked up by Bethesda for Fallout 3 and beyond (we even see them in the Amazon Fallout TV show). But Cain remembered how he came up with the idea, pointing to his obsession with the daily American comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
“We designed Sugar Bombs,” Cain said. “I found notes where I mentioned Sugar Bombs. I was a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan. I had the box set. It was designed, but it was never added. We talked about it. We never added it. And it was purely I loved Calvin and Hobbes, so of course Sugar Bombs are in one of my games.”
So there you have it: why China nuked first; the lottery that decided who left Vault 13; vault suits being extruded; Harold not being a typical… anything; and the origin of Sugar Bombs. That’s quite the treasure trove from Cain, a collection of things that were a part of the original Fallout but were never described directly.
But remember, none of this is canon. As Cain says: “This is just for fun.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
