The cursed Vault Boy drawing Fallout creators would like to forget, but fans never will

polygon.com:

Fallout’s colorful mascot Vault Boy stands in stark contrast to the grim, violent, post-apocalyptic reality of the role-playing game franchise. Originally inspired by the Chance cards from the board game Monopoly and 1950s-era cartoons, the blue-and-yellow jumpsuited cartoon character was designed to illustrate how perks and abilities worked in Fallout games.

Much of the humor around Vault Boy comes from the weird and macabre situations the cheery Vault-Tec mascot finds himself in. Early Fallout games showed Vault Boy as a grave robber, slaver, mass murderer, and frequent sex-haver when the player gained a “reputation” by performing certain in-game feats. But one Vault Boy cartoon from Fallout 2 was so offensive in its design, its creators pulled it from the game — which turned it into one of the most fabled bits of iconography in the series.

Child Killer is a reputation status in Fallout and Fallout 2 that is rewarded to the player after killing multiple child NPCs. The unused illustration for Child Killer depicts Vault Boy delivering a swift kick to the pregnant belly of a woman — who is wearing a dress with the word “baby” printed on the bust and a downward-pointing arrow directed at her unborn child to make it explicitly clear what’s occurring. Vault Boy is smiling in the Child Killer drawing, while his victim looks shocked.

Former Interplay Entertainment artist Brian Menze exposed the original, unused Child Killer illustration to the wider world in 2010, when he uploaded his drawing of Vault Boy to DeviantArt. In a description of the piece (which was quickly deleted), Menze said the image “was unused and the only Vault Boy image to ever be cut from Fallout 2. (I’m sure you can figure out why).” Reportedly, another illustration of Vault Boy masturbating on the toilet was also cut from the game, despite what Menze says.

“I remember when I got the request to do a perk illustration for ‘child killer’ that there would be no way to keep [it] from being offensive,”