Lore Break: The Vault Experiments

Taking a short break here to talk about Fallout lore, for those reading this who may never have played the games.

Fallout is a series of tongue-in-cheek, post-apocalyptic RPG games that dates back to the 1990's. You can still play all the games in the series, going all the way back to the original Fallout (and even further back to the original 1988 Wasteland), on to more recent chapters such as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. You can even play FOnline2, a completely free-to-play fan-made MMORPG based on Fallout 2. And now, Fallout 4 has finally been announced to be released in the fall of 2015.

Our Fallout 4 faith is strong.  TO VICTORY!

This blog is mainly about my adventures in Fallout Shelter, the first mobile game in the Fallout universe, and in particular, the story of Vault 551 and Father Benny The Most High - a story made easier to understand by taking a minute to understand Fallout.  And to understand Fallout, you have to understand Vaults, Project Safehouse and the Great War.  Lore dump after the jump.


The Fallout universe is similar to but not quite our own.  Things got a little weird after World War II (a departure referred to in the lore as the Divergence), leading to a 21st century America that is more or less the idealized pop-science future from 1950's comic books.  Buck Rogers ray guns, Forbidden Planet-type robots, fusion cars and the suburban nuclear family utopia: this is world of Fallout.

And really, really expensive gas.

Not everything is perfect in utopia, however.  Battles over dwindling oil and food supplies eventually lead to a massive nuclear war in October 2077, as an overly nostalgic and fascist United States trades atomic fire with an increasingly ruthless and desperate China.

As the bombs start to finally fall, the only real hope for the survival of the American Dream is the Vault system, also known as Project Safehouse: a network of huge underground bomb shelters, built and administered by the Vault Tec Corporation. You may have seen the thumbs-up Vault Boy logo - he's the "everything's just FINE!" mascot for the Vaults.  Nothing to worry about here, guys!

Vault Boy is your very best friend.

Hundreds of these shelters had been built throughout North America in the years before the Great War, reservations sold at steep prices to an increasingly nervous public. A lot of people at Vault Tec became very wealthy, mainly due to large government contracts. When the Great War begins, however, some people make it and a lot of people don't.  With a handful of rare exceptions, the lucky Vault Dwellers represent the only intact human survivors of the war, and for 150 years or so, American civilization exists almost solely within the Vault system.

Think Titanic, only on a much larger scale and with more radiation.

Unfortunately, the Vault lifeboats were not what they seemed. Rather than simply consisting of well built, reliable spaces to protect their populations from the horrors of post-nuke America, Project Safehouse's Vaults turned out to actually be the world's largest and most cruelly misguided science experiment ever.

But not YOUR Vault.  Your Vault is one of the lucky ones!  Vault Boy says friends don't lie!

A very few Vaults (such as Vault 101, from Fallout 3) were designed to operate exactly as advertised. The others, however, were each intentionally designed with serious compromising flaws. In one, the main Vault door would not seal properly, purposefully exposing its inhabitants to radiation. In another, hallucinogenic drugs were pumped into the air to drive the inhabitants violently insane. Yet another Vault was populated by one man and 1,000 women. According to legend, one Vault simply sealed one man in with a whole lot of hand puppets to see what would happen.

Most of the Vaults have been lost to history, and by the time of Fallout: New Vegas, 200 years have passed since the cataclysm of the Great War.  Some Vaults, like Vault 101 in Washington D.C., remained sealed until fairly recently.  Others failed early.  Most of the stories of the Wasteland, however, have yet to be told, leaving loose plot threads still dangling all over the place.

Such as Harold.  Believe it or not, Harold really IS your friend.  Long, LONG story, is Harold's.

In some commonly accepted versions of Fallout lore, the Vault experiments were conducted mainly to facilitate the exodus from Earth of a secret cabal of American industrialists and military minds called the Enclave. But that's an entirely different story, involving these charming guys:

We are the Enclave, we are your friends and we are here to help you.  Trust us.  Please step this way.

Which brings us back to Fallout Shelter.

In this game, you have been charged with the task of handling administration duties of one of these Vaults. Yours might be one of the extremely rare control Vaults, but most likely not. Yours is probably one of the many deranged experimental Vaults, a vicious hoax designed to conduct cruel and pointless medical studies on an unsuspecting populace hopelessly addicted to 1950's TV.  How you choose to fulfill your duties - duties known only to you - is completely up to your discretion.

Good luck with that.

My prediction is that you'll find, as I did, that running a warped science experiment on unsuspecting civilians is a lot more fun than just endlessly filling up food and water stores.

If you'd like to learn more about the Vaults, Vault Tec, the Enclave or any other aspect of the amazingly rich and detailed backstory of the Fallout universe, I'd recommend starting with browsing the Fallout wiki (aka Nukapedia). Really, it's a great story and a terrific set of games.


Afternote: The story of Vault 77, the experiment involving one man and a lot of puppets, is quite an entertaining one that shows admirably how messed up Project Safehouse was. You can get the full story (completely canon, according to Bethesda) in this very well done, funny and informative fan video.