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Fallout was originally meant to have 1,000 vaults

Fallout creator and designer Tim Cain reveals that Fallout was originally supposed to have a whopping 1,000 vaults spread across irradiated America.

Fallout was originally meant to have 1,000 vaults
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Senior Gaming Editor
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Fallout series co-creator Tim Cain shares some interesting tidbits on Interplay's original plans for the franchise's infamous vaults.

The Fallout series has little over 100 vaults, all-told...but this number was supposed to be much, much higher. Interplay, the devs of the first Fallout game, had planned for about 1,000 vaults at one point in time.

In a recent YouTube video, Fallout producer, co-creator, lead programmer and designer Tim Cain explains why there were so many vaults in planning and, more importantly, why there aren't that many vaults in the actual games.

The original design for vaults was that there was going to be 1,000. And the only reason this pin was even placed in the original game, was when Leonard [Boyarsky] was doing the vault suit, he asked how many digits he'd need to keep on the back.

We had Vault 13, but he wanted to know if there's going to be Vault 106, a Vault 1218...and I thought 'well, let's just say there's a round number--there's a thousand. And he asked if there's going to be four digits, and I said no, I'm a programmer, I start counting at 0. So three digits.

So there's 50 states, and 1,000 vaults...that means each state should have about 20 vaults, or thereabouts. Bigger states would have a lot more, smaller states would have a lot less. Texas probably needed more than 20 vaults, I don't think Rhode Island would need 20 vaults.

Fallout 1 was middle of California and all of Southern California--Bakersfield, the Fresno area, south. So that's about half of California. Fallout 2 was that area but to the north. Together, Fallout 1 & 2 were pretty much the entire state of California. It's a pretty big state, so you'd expect at least 20...but Fallout 1 & 2 combined only had about 4-6 vaults in them that were clearly defined. And that's if you count a couple of the unnumbered ones.

They had a TV show, which was also set in California, because it was in the Los Angeles area--they added four more, 31, 32, 33 and 4. So they added four more vaults. That still only gets us to ten, ten vaults for the entire state of California. Big state, only ten vaults. So you'd expect at least ten more vaults somewhere out there that the games and the TV show haven't touched.

If you look at California, it looks under-served with vaults. So what's going on? I think the obvious conclusion here is Vault-Tec. They didn't build all 1,000 vaults. They didn't even come close. And I think this makes sense when you think of Vault-Tec; you could argue that they were planning to do all 1,000, and they just never made it.

But the show kind of implied there were vaults in Canada and Mexico as well, which meant maybe that they were building more than 1,000. But we don't see anything close to that in the estimates I've given for these games that covered an entire state.

If we look at all the games together and the show, my estimate is that Vault-Tec probably built fewer than half, probably far fewer than half of the vaults they were supposed to.

I think the answer is simple: Vault-Tec. The answer is obviously money.

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Derek joined the TweakTown team in 2015 and has since reviewed and played 1000s of hours of new games. Derek is absorbed with the intersection of technology and gaming, and is always looking forward to new advancements. With over six years in games journalism under his belt, Derek aims to further engage the gaming sector while taking a peek under the tech that powers it. He hopes to one day explore the stars in No Man's Sky with the magic of VR.

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