Fallout's original co-creator has casually dropped 'the true purpose of vaults' on YouTube
Tim Cain's had a storied career, hasn't he? The man's had a hand in pretty much all of my favourite games: Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity, and Tyranny. Now the legendary game designer has a new hobby: Dropping (in the inimitable words of PCG's Ted Litchfield) "heater after heater(opens in new tab)" of classic RPG development lore over on his YouTube channel(opens in new tab).
One of those heaters is the absolutely irresistible «The true purpose of vaults in Fallout,» wherein Cain drops the knowledge that—in his original conception at the end of Fallout 1—the vaults were basically testbeds for a starship.
«If you ever read reports from the '50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange,» said Cain, «there basically is no Earth to come back to». That cheery thought gave him an idea, «Maybe that was the whole point: There is no Earth to come back to».
«So the head of the Enclave»—Fallout's quasi-fascist continuity US government after the war, and a secretive deep state apparatus before it—«and probably the very highest levels of the US government were like, 'let's build a starship'».
But because all the other planets in our solar system kind of suck, the starship's voyage would take hundreds if not thousands of years to find somewhere habitable. That meant adapting to the challenges of feeding multiple generations of crew in an enclosed environment, putting people in cryo-storage, and generally making sure your best and brightest didn't die in the vacuum of space.
And well, by golly, it turned out that Vault-Tec had just the answer for that. «Every vault was in some sense a test,» said Cain, even the control vaults like the one
Read more on pcgamer.com
