The cursed Vault Boy drawing that Fallout’s creators would love to forget, but fans never will

Fallout’s colorful mascot Vault Boy stands in stark contrast to the grim, violent, post-apocalyptic reality of the role-playing franchise. Originally inspired by the Chance cards from the board game Monopoly and cartoons from the 1950s, the blue and yellow jumpsuit cartoon character was designed to illustrate how perks and abilities worked in Fallout games.

Much of the humor surrounding Vault Boy comes from the strange and macabre situations the cheerful Vault-Tec mascot finds himself in. Early Fallout games featured Vault Boy as a grave robber, slave trader, mass murderer, and frequent sex addict as the player gained a “reputation” by performing certain in-game feats. Only one Vault Boy cartoon out Fallout 2 was so offensive in design that the creators removed it from the game – making it one of the most legendary pieces of iconography in the series.

Child Killer has a reputation status in Fallout And Fallout 2 which is rewarded to the player after killing multiple child NPCs. The unused illustration for Child Killer shows Vault Boy delivering a swift kick to a woman’s pregnant belly – who is wearing a dress with the word ‘baby’ printed on the bust and a downward-pointing arrow aimed at her unborn child to to save it. make it clear what is happening. Vault Boy laughs in the Child Killer drawing, while his victim looks shocked.

Former Interplay Entertainment artist Brian Menze exposed the original, unused Child Killer artwork to the wider world in 2010 when he uploaded his drawing of Vault Boy to DeviantArt. In a description of the piece (which was quickly deleted), Menze said the image was “unused and the only Vault Boy image ever cut from Fallout 2. (I’m sure you can figure out why).” Said to be another illustration of Vault Boy masturbates on the toilet was also taken out of the game, despite what Menze says.

“I remember when I got the request to do an extra for ‘child murderer,’ there was no way I could avoid it being offensive,” Menze wrote in 2010. “I really mean it! How do you create an illustration of ‘child killer’ and keep it from being offensive? Anyway, for some reason I thought this was the least offensive way to do it. I have no idea what I was thinking. Even the designer who asked for it realized it was a bad idea, so we rejected it. Looking back now, I can’t believe I signed this.”

Child Killer’s reputation still exists Fallout 2; it just uses another illustration of Vault Boy running from an angry mob. Fans of the original, unused artwork can re-add it to the classic games using mods.

The option to kill children Fallout 2 was only available in some versions of the game, according to the makers.

“We allowed it,” the original recalls Fallout creator Tim Cain in a presentation at GDC 2012. “We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to get kids in the game. If you shoot them, it’s a huge penalty for karma, you’re really hated, there are places where you can’t sell, there are people who will shoot you on the spot,” and we thought people could decide for themselves what to wanted to do. Doing. This has of course contributed to our M rating. Europe said no. They wouldn’t even sell the game if there were children in the game. We didn’t have time to rewrite all the quests, so we just deleted children from the disk. There are things that refer to children; you just never see children.”

Every few years, Child Killer’s reputation artwork resurfaces as a new discovery for a Fallout fan. Sometimes it is adapted for a meme format, gender swappedor made into a piece of unofficial merchandise. Child Killer’s reputation didn’t carry over into the Bethesda Softworks era of Fallout – ie Fallout 3 and beyond – but its small, funny legacy as one of the franchise’s most offensive images manages to hold its own among its most ardent fans.