Fallout co-creator reveals the true purpose of the vaults

Tim Cain, one of the creators of the Fallout series, has “set the record straight” on the true original purpose of the series’ famous vaults.

In a video posted on his Youtube channelembedded below, Cain revealed that the idea behind the Vaults and their various dastardly experiments was to help scientists understand how humans could survive interstellar travel – an idea he conceived after the release of Fallout 1 in 1997.

Deciding that there would be “no land to return to” in the event of a nuclear war, the Clave’s leader and the US government hatched a plan to build a spaceship that would take “our best and brightest” in a distant solar system. in hopes of colonizing a suitable planet.

Given the distance and time required for such an undertaking, the spacecraft should be multi-generational. But mankind had no idea how to keep humans alive on a journey that would take hundreds of years, so Vault-Tec thought it could use the Vaults to figure out the technology that would do the job.

Some of Fallout’s infamous vaults are starting to make more sense in the context of this plan. “We’re going to have to grow food because the crew will need to be awake and active,” Cain explained.

“That’s where multigeneration comes in, so they’re going to have to have food. We’re going to have to figure out how to grow plants really well in an enclosed environment.

“We also need water for them. We will have to make sure that the water circulates well and can be purified.

“We’re also going to have to figure out how to store the crew. You know, we’re going to have to have cryogenic chambers and see if we take them out every few years, if there’s any freezer burn inside.”

The making of Fallout 1 & 2: Tales of the Early Days from Black Isle Studios.

Fallout chests were therefore designed to figure out how to solve these kinds of problems for a spaceship.

“…every safe was in some way a test even if it was [a control vault]“, explained Cain.

“I always thought the vault that created Vault City in Fallout 2 was a control vault: it was designed to do everything right. It opened after 10 years, everyone came out, they had a working Garden of Eden creation kit and everything worked.”

Even Vault 13, the starting point for the first Fallout game, makes sense in this context, despite the fact that Cain came up with this idea after finishing Fallout 1.

Cain again: “Vault 13 where the player was originally in Fallout was not designed to work. They wanted to see how long one of those chests would last and so the Overseer – the generations of Overseers there -down- was ordered to keep people indoors, and when they had a malfunction they were originally told “Try to find a way to fix it, we don’t want that someone go”.

“And when they took someone out, well, nobody ever came back. Obviously a few people got out before the player. When the player finally got out, he was told, ‘Okay, he can’t stay when he comes back’, which sort of retroactively explains everything we had already established.”

Cain said the purpose of the vaults that players are initially led to believe in the game – that they were designed to save a portion of the American population who would then return to a radioactive dead zone to repopulate the land,” doesn’t mean anything.”

But making the vaults into technological experimental beds with the goal of creating a multi-generational spacecraft that would carry a fraction of the world’s population in the event of nuclear war “made sense”.

“That’s what we wrote,” Cain said. “I can’t speak to how they’ve been designed and developed since, but I never see them through the lens of ‘Look at these wacky experiments’. Each one I was, like, ‘Yeah I can see how it would help to make a spaceship.’

“You can think of the Enclave as evil or goofy or whatever you want, but there was originally a purpose for it all.”

So this is it. We all thought the vaults were just meant to conduct gruesome experiments on their inhabitants, but it turns out there was another, higher purpose.

Of course, that’s the original idea behind Fallout vaults and not necessarily the official tradition Bethesda, current custodian of the Fallout series, continued when it took over from Interplay and released Fallout 3. Perhaps When Fallout 5 eventually comes out, we’ll find out.