Fallout’s original creator reveals number of vaults originally planned

Fallout is one of the most popular and prominent franchises in the history of video games, and has recently seen huge success with its television series. One of the most important figures surrounding Fallout is Timothy Cain, the game’s creator, who has a YouTube channel where he regularly uploads videos discussing a variety of topics related to the video game industry and the design and creation of these games. Fallout, of course, is a recurring topic, and in his latest video he talks about the number of shelters that were originally planned for the game, and how interest in them has been revived thanks to the Prime Video series.

“The original design for Vaults was that there were going to be 1,000, Much later we started revisiting this idea. If each of these Vaults hold 1,000 people, that’s only a million people, which is way less than the population that we imagined in the US. “There are 50 states, 1,000 Vaults. That means every state should have about 20 Vaults. Bigger states would have more, smaller states would have less. I’m sure it’s not distributed evenly, but we’re looking at about 20 Vaults per state. Fallout 1 was in the middle of California and southern California,” says Tim Cain in the video.

Fallout and Shelters in the Franchise

Cain goes on to talk about the shelters that have appeared in both the series and the various games in the franchise, emphasizing that “Vault-Tec. They didn’t build all 1,000 Vaults. They didn’t even come close. I know some of the Fallout games show Vaults still under construction when the bombs fell, so you could argue they were planning to do all 1,000 and they just never made it – they never got there.”

So how many shelters did Vault-Tec manage to build? Tim Cain thinks that “If you look at all the games together and the show, I think my estimate would be Vault-Tec had probably built fewer than half – probably far fewer – than the Vaults they were supposed to. And then you have to go ‘well, why was that? What’s going on?’ Not only did they [Vault-Tec] win the contract from the government by underbidding – severely underbidding – they probably also underplanned and underscheduled, and probably just didn’t think they were going to do them all.”