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 to his YouTube channel, embedded below, Cain revealed the idea behind the vaults and their various dastardly experiments was to help scientists figure out how humans might survive interstellar travel – an idea he conveived after Fallout 1 came out in 1997.
Fallout’s vaults, then, were designed to figure out how to solve these sorts of problems for a starship.
“… every vault was in some sense a test even if they were [a control vault],” Cain explained.
“I always thought the vault that made Vault City in Fallout 2 was a control vault: it was designed to do everything right. It opened after 10 years, everybody came out, they had a working Garden of Eden Creation Kit and everything worked.”
Even Vault 13, the starting point of the first Fallout game, makes sense in this context, despite the fact Cain came up with this idea after finishing Fallout 1.
Cain again: “Vault 13 where the player was originally in Fallout wasn’t designed to work. They wanted to see how long one of these vaults would last and so the overseer – the generations of overseers in there – were told to keep people in, and when they had something malfunction, they were originally told, ‘try to figure out how to fix it, we don’t want anyone leaving.’