Fallout was nearly called 'Warriors of the Apocalypse', 'Radstorm', 'Moribund World' and so many other terrible names

pcgamer.com:

Perhaps my favourite thing in the more recent Fallout games is just wandering the wasteland listening to the outstanding selection of old music. The first time «Crawl out through the Fallout» came on, I couldn't believe how funny and perfect it was for the game, encapsulating exactly that kind of nuclear gallows humour that the entire series plays off. In fact it's hard to imagine Fallout being called anything else: But boy, did it dodge several bullets.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has in recent times been reminiscing about his earlier days in the industry, and was obviously at developer Interplay when the first title in the series was being developed. Initially the game's builds were labelled 'GURPS' (an in-joke about the tabletop system that inspired many mechanics) and had the codename 'Vault 13' based on the bunker the player starts the game from, but the developers knew this wouldn't do for the final product. After all, if it was a success, were they going to make Vault 13 part 2?

«It’s very very hard to come up with a name for a game, especially a new game with new mechanics, a new setting, and new characters,» said Cain. «By the late ‘90s, there was already this vibe that a lot of words were being overused in game names, words like 'dark' or 'shadow' or 'blood.' These were starting to show up so much that we would almost kind of make fun and be like 'let’s call ours Dark World or Dim Place, or Souls of Blood'. They're over-used and we were kind of over it».

One thing was clear: Vault 13 wasn't going to do the job. «It was a bad name,» said Cain. «I said we really need to come up with something better.» Then Cain produces a relic: A word document containing a memo from June 19, 1996, focused on potential names for