Fallout creator Tim Cain on the real reason why vaults exist
If you thought the Fallout vaults were just to defend against nuclear fallout, as we did, it looks like you were wrong. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain casually turned the RPG series’ lore on its head in a new episode of his highly informative YouTube series about the games he’s worked on (thanks, PC Gamer).
Cain said the vaults were actually intended as test units for a great space migration away from the wasteland that Earth would become after a nuclear war.
“”If you ever read reports from the ’50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange, there basically is no Earth to come back to,” Cain said. “Maybe that was the whole point: There is no Earth to come back to.”
The process of jettisoning thousands of people into the stars was fraught with dangers and uncertainties, so Vault-Tec and the Enclave government used each vault as a test to pave the way. One vault was intended to fail on purpose under certain circumstances, while others tested machinery and other tools designed to keep people alive in the harsh emptiness of space. Some overseers were just told to keep people inside as long as possible.
Cain’s explanation certainly clears up a lot, like why your home vault in Fallout 3 is so isolated from the rest of the world and what the ultimate goal was when people emerged aboveground again (because they weren’t expected to). It also explains an issue I had when I first played Fallout 3, which is why no one seemed to show any concern over the prospect of a dwindling gene pool when a small group of people made a vault their home for generations.
Cain said he’s unsure whether Bethesda’s vision for Fallout has the same concept of vaults or if anyone on the Bethesda team even knows about their origins, though someone likely does now. We won’t know for a while either. Fallout 5 exists, but Starfield is the main focus for at least the rest of 2023, followed by The Elder Scrolls 6.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF