The Top 50 Things You Never Knew About Fallout, Pt. 2

 

Welcome back to The Top 50 Things You Never Knew About Fallout..Part 2! If you're just joining us, be sure to catch up on Part 1 first!

 

26. In the files for Fallout: New Vegas, there is an unused Fire Gecko named Gojira, an obvious reference to Godzilla. It is three times the size of a normal Fire Gecko and has its own unique, immensely powerful fire breath weapon called Gojira's Flame. According to J.E. Sawyer, the creature was made by an animator to terrorize Camp McCarren, and was never meant to be in the final game.

 

 

27. In the cancelled Fallout 3 (called Van Buren) made by Black Isle Studios, a type of ghoul known as “Born Ghoul” was going to be featured. As the name would suggest, this type of ghoul would be born in their condition, as opposed to being exposed to excessive radiation. The concept has yet to show up in subsequent Fallout games, however, there is a story about Santa Monica, the patron saint of the church at Rivet City in Bethesda’s Fallout 3, that says she was born from two ghouls. It is unknown if this is one of the many cases where Bethesda incorporated Black Isle Studios work into the final Fallout 3, or if the Saint Monica story is merely a creative spin on the virgin birth of Christianity. Either way it is worth noting.
 

 

28. Unused holotapes in Fallout 3 indicate that Fawkes, the Super Mutant companion who helps you retrieve the G.E.C.K., was forcibly turned exposed to FEV in retaliation after he started to question the experiments in Vault 87.

 

29. Vault 108, arguably a favorite among fans, was famously filled with dozens of clones of a man named Gary, all of whom could only say one word--”Gary”. And apparently, one of the Garys met with a bad fate at the hands of the Outcasts. The band of ex-Brotherhood of Steel soldiers, in need of a Pip-Boy 3000 to complete the Operation Anchorage simulation, appear to have sawed off the arm of Gary 23, whose mutilated body can be found in the Outcast outpost where the Anchorage simulation begins. An audio tape cut from the final version of the game confirms these events. Luckily, the Lone Wanderer manages to avoid a similar fate.

30. In Captain Dean Boat Rentals at Calville Bay in New Vegas, you can find a toy car on a shelf that beckons you to “Take”. Picking it up prompts the message “"Good! Now push (grab button) again to let go of the skull." Uhh, what? Freaky.

 

 

31. Throughout the history of Fallout, many real-life places have inspired in-game locations, but in some cases, the line between reality and fiction is heavily blurred. Goodsprings, the town The Courier wakes up in during the opening sequence of Fallout: New Vegas, is an almost exact replica of a real place bearing the same name. It’s a similar story with Primm, where all the businesses are veiled references to buildings in the real city, and Bonnie Springs, a resort-like area outside of New Vegas, which bears a cheesy, cliche Western appearance because of its origins as a popular location for shooting old cowboy Western films in real life.

32. A lot of folks may already know this one, but it bears pointing out and reinforcing. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can eventually coax the former NCR soldier companion Boone to reveal his tragic backstory, which includes a pregnant wife kidnapped by Legion and taken to Cottonwood Cove to be auctioned off as a slave. If you visit Cottonwood Cove, just outside is a place known as Sniper’s Nest, where you can get the Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle with 100 Lockpick skill. This sniper rifle isn’t just any sniper rifle--it’s Boone’s. And it’s the gun he used to mercy kill his wife (and unborn child) as she stood on the slave auction block. Yup, that sniper rifle you’ve been using the entire game was Boone’s and it was used to kill his family, from that very spot.

No wonder he’s so quiet.

 

33. Out of cultural sensitivity, the quest to blow up Megaton does not exist in the Japanese version of Fallout 3.

 

 

34. The Mariposa Military Base from Fallout and Fallout 2, where the initial batches of mutation-causing FEV were tested, is named after the Spanish word for butterfly, likely a reference to the metamorphosis process that humans go through once exposed to the virus. The location is based on Fort Ord, a military base that once existed in Monterey, California. 

 

 

35. Remember the B-29 bomber that’s at the bottom of Lake Mead in Fallout: New Vegas? Surprise! A modified B-29 bomber actually did crash into Lake Mead in 1948. Similarly, the ongoing issues at REPCONN, an aerospace company in New Vegas, are a reference to PEPCON, the site of a real-life industrial accident that caused several explosions and the loss of two lives in Henderson Nevada back in 1988.

 

 

36. The Wolfhorn Ranch in Fallout: New Vegas is known as Ulysses’ Camp in the Italian, Spanish, and French versions of the game. Thus the property, along with unique cleaver The Chopper resting on the kitchen stove, must belong to him. Originally, Ulysses was supposed to be a companion, but for a number of reasons the idea never came to fruition. Perhaps this location would have been his retreat when not aiding the Courier.

 

 

37. In all of the Mojave there is only one Evil Gnome (a variety on the common Garden Gnome found throughout the game), located in the Fire Root Cavern. It is based on the model for the regular Garden Gnome, but has been altered to resemble New Vegas lead world builder Scott Everts.

 

 

38. You can “tip’ the Brahman. Creep up behind them and give ‘em a push!

 

 

39. The New Vegas outskirt of Freeside was originally meant to be much larger. You can download a mod that restores the cut stuff over at the Nexus Forums, though sadly the content was never finished by developers and thus is incomplete.

 

 

40. Only four non-playable characters in the entire Fallout series have a full ten points in all SPECIAL attributes: Ulysses, Colonel Royez, and Gaius Magnus from Fallout: New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road, and Frank Horrigan, the primary antagonist of Fallout 2.

 

 

41. Remember at the beginning of Fallout: New Vegas when Doc Mitchell says he understands what it’s like to lose something important to you? As touching as that may have seemed, he wasn’t actually talking about his dead wife. He was talking about having lost the Vault 21 casino to House when the Strip was taken over. It’s an understandable grief, though not nearly as sentimental.

 

 

42. Examining a map of the West Coast, it appears that the location of Vault 15 from the original Fallout is actually fairly close to the Mojave Wasteland of Fallout: New Vegas. Modders, get thee to the G.E.C.K.!

 

 

43. In Fallout 3, the ghoul Carol in Underworld will, when asked, discuss the bombs that fell on Washington D.C. and what it was like in the immediate aftermath. At one point she describes seeing her father’s “shadow” etched in the pavement as a result of the radiation. In The Courier’s Mile in Fallout: New Vegas, an area that is highly irradiated as the result of the actions of the Courier, you can see an illustration of this effect.

 

 

44. In Fallout: New Vegas, if you allow Benny to flee to The Fort, but decide to release him, there was supposed to be a scripted event where later he’d sneak up behind you and then attack you, calling the player a fool for having mercy on him. It was cut from the final version of the game.

 

 

45. A fascinating location removed early in the development process of Fallout 2 was TV Town, which would have been a city built by an intelligent computer and based on television shows from the 50s and 60s. Its idyllic nature would have been the envy of all the other nearby settlements, but alas, the content was cut. An Area 51 location was also cut.

 

 

46. There have been a lot cancelled Fallout games and failed Fallout projects in the history of the series. “Several” iPhone titles have been pitched and rejected. A PlayStation version of Fallout was in development for about 3-4 months before Interplay abandoned it, and a squad based first and third person tactical game called Fallout Extreme never got past the concept stage. Fallout Pen and Paper d20, which began development under Interplay, was forced to change the game’s name to Exodus after the company was purchased by Bethesda, effectively “cancelling” it as a Fallout title.

 

Both Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel were to receive sequels; BoS 2, put into production before the release of the original and referred to as “Vagrant Lands”, was almost finished when massive layoffs at Interplay in 2004 impeded its release. Fallout:Tactics 2, which would have taken place near Florida, was cancelled once Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel began to sell poorly. And Project v13, the Interplay Fallout MMO, was ultimately shut down due to the licensing ownership issues with Bethesda.
 

 

47. Judging from the concept art , Interplay may have designed Project v13, aka Fallout Online, to take place in Seattle or the Pacific Northwest. Fallout Extreme, another cancelled Fallout project, would have also taken place in the Pacific Northwest and included locations like The Sound, Capitol Hill, Issaquah Nation, Mount St. Helens (site of Vault 6) and something called Seattle Underground.

 

 

48. At one point there was content written for Fallout that would have included a mutated humanoid race of raccoons, resulting from FEV experimentation. While the developers felt it was well written, they also thought it wouldn’t fit the universe of Fallout very well, and so it was cut from the final version. The only trace that remains in the game is a holodisk detailing the experiment.

 

 

49. In Fallout 2, there was originally going to be a "gay faction" called the Rainbow Federation. The content was cut from the final version but judging by the dialogue files left behind, perhaps that was for the best.

 

 

50. There is sufficient evidence in the Fallout 3 code to suggest the Lone Wanderer was originally meant to pitch baseballs as one of their attacks. This means at one point in development it was possible to throw items other than grenades. That feature was cut but reappared somewhat in New Vegas, in the form of throwing spears, hatchets, and tomahawks. Meanwhile, plans for piggy bank mines and mason jar mines appear to have never left the concept stage.