Trivia / Fallout

• Divorced Installment: Originally the game was going to use the GURPS system for character creation, and was entitled Vault 13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure. Disagreements with Steve Jackson led to the termination of Black Isle's GURPS license, so the developers cooked up the SPECIAL system for the game and changed the title to Fallout.
  • Before being a new franchise, they intended to instead revive the Wasteland franchise. Then they discovered that Interplay’s 10th anniversary collection accidentally made the rights revert to EA for another seven years.
• Dummied Out: A small amount of content (though not nearly as much as in the sequel) was dummied out or left unfinished when the game was released — most noticeably a sidequest to find a spy in the Followers who doesn't actually exist, rendering that subplot unfinishable, or the fact that it's impossible to report Iguana Bob to the cops. Some of this content (like some of Nicole's role, which got cut down due to time constraints) can be restored with mods like Fallout Fixt.
• The Other Marty: Tim Cain brought up in a video on his channel about the process of hiring the voice actors that originally, Cabbot (the Brotherhood of Steel doorman) was to be voiced by a well-known actor, but it was soon realized that he was no voice actor, and so Richard Moll was brought in on short notice to do it. As to who the original VA was supposed to be, Cain declined to say.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Black Isle originally wanted to use "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" by The Ink Spots for the intro song, but the license holder, EMI, asked for a large amount of money for the rights to the song. So instead, the developers went back through The Ink Spots' catalogue of songs and chose "Maybe" instead. Interestingly, "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" was eventually used as Fallout 3's intro song.
  • In general, many things were cut from the game.
  • Additional Raider factions (The Jackals and The Vipers) were cut. You could report Iguana Bob to the Hub police (and is in fact a requirement for one of the endings, which you naturally cannot get in the final game). In the Mariposa Military Base you could have taunted a super mutant into lowering some energy barriers. In the L.A. Boneyard there was to be a gang (the Rippers) in the Deathclaw Warehouse with associated quests (the cybernetic hand of the leader is a dummied out item itself!). Also a cut area named the Burrows where FEV-mutated raccoons lived (the only thing in the game that remains are a few things in The Glow, such as a holodisk detailing the raccoon experiment). You could also get addicted to alcohol. One removed encounter was of a caravan wrecked by a super mutant (that also perished) — whom you recognize as a previous Vault Scout sent before you. There was also an invasion ending for the Lost Hills Bunker where a (dummied out) traitor of the Brotherhood would sell out the location of the bunker to the Unity, which you could prevent. Etcetera, etcetera.
  • The original draft of the conclusion of the Junktown questline was rather morally grey, with Gizmo turning the town into a grade-A resort in which society flourished, although for a mainly selfish reason, and on the other hand having Killian become a Knight Templar who ends up ridding the town of crime once and for all, which also causes a slow depopulation of the place, as people would start to avoid it in fear of the overzealous sheriff. This was scrapped for the final release after the dev team realized that these outcomes came seemingly out of nowhere with absolutely no indication that there is more to the situation than meets the eye, according to this interview.
  • One of the concepts dropped from the game during development to meet release deadlines was a race of FEV-mutated Noble Savage raccoons called the S'Lanter, descended from two pairs of FEV test subjects that escaped from the research facility that ended up as the Glow. It was scrapped because to the devs, the idea didn't feel Fallout enough; as such, the only hint left in the game about their existence is the FEV experiment holodisk at the Glow mentioning that when the virus made the test subjects smart enough to escape from the laboratory, the guards hunted them down and exterminated them, but two pairs remained unaccounted for.