Abstract
Problem: What content was designed but never made it into Fallout and Fallout 2, and why?
Approach: Tim Cain reconstructs cut content from personal notebooks he kept during development, supplemented by conversations with Leonard Boyarsky.
Findings: Several features were cut from Fallout — Terminator-style robots, talking raccoons (the S'Lanter/Rekree), LA-area themed gangs, and a post-apocalyptic Interplay office building easter egg. From Fallout 2, the Abbey of Lost Knowledge (inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz) was designed by Cain but never implemented. Content was cut for four reasons: it didn't fit the aesthetic, it wasn't finished, it was buggy, or for unknown reasons.
Key insight: One of the hardest skills in game design is editing your ideas — recognizing that something is a good idea, but not a good idea for this game.
Tim's Notebooks and Memory
When Cain left Interplay, he was warned not to take any company property. He left behind all code and design documents. Ironically, Interplay later lost the Fallout source code and called him to ask if he had it — "Is this a trap?" he wondered.
What he did keep were personal notebooks from a habit developed in grad school. These dated notes allowed him to reconstruct a detailed Fallout development timeline, down to exact dates for decisions like adding character voice-over or when specific team members joined the project.
Terminator-Style Robots
A designer submitted a concept for sleek, metallic endoskeleton-style robots. Cain rejected it because Fallout's aesthetic touchstones were 1950s-era robots like Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Mr. Handy and the other robots already in the game followed this direction.
Cain notes he was surprised to see synths appear in Fallout 4, as they resembled the concepts he had cut from the original game. While acknowledging Bethesda can do whatever they want and it becomes canon, he personally didn't like them.
Talking Raccoons (The S'Lanter / Rekree)
Scott Campbell designed talking raccoons — animals exposed to FEV that gained intelligence and learned language from the scientists studying them, likely at the facility that became the Glow. They were presented as living in a hollow tree, which immediately made Cain think of Keebler Elves.
Cain vetoed them for two reasons: the hollow tree presentation felt wrong tonally, and more broadly, he opposed talking animals in Fallout. This extended to talking Deathclaws — he believed Deathclaws should remain purely terrifying killing machines. He also criticized Fallout 4's approach of having players fight a Deathclaw at very low level, arguing it undermined their fear factor. In Fallout 1, players heard terrifying rumors, found mysterious eggs, fought what turned out to be a baby Deathclaw, and then discovered the mother was far worse.
The LA Gangs
The Boneyard area was supposed to feature multiple themed gangs (including the Vipers) with named leaders, territorial disputes, equipment caches, and associated quest lines. This content was never finished rather than deliberately cut — when those areas needed to ship, they were completed differently. References to these gangs survived in later games; characters in Shady Sands mention them by name.
The Interplay Building Easter Egg
Cain's team planned to recreate the actual Interplay office building in Irvine as an in-game location, situated between the Cathedral and the Glow. The building would still have a functioning emergency generator powering point-defense turrets.
Two memorable details were planned:
- Brian Fargo's Dodge Viper would still be sitting in the parking lot, looking usable, but any approach would get the player destroyed by turrets.
- A skeleton at the door — when emergency power diverted energy to turrets, the electronic fob entry system shut down. A skeleton (planned to be producer Bill Dugan, identifiable by his lanyard) would be found pressed against a door, fob in hand, unable to escape.
The Post-Credits Cutscene
A planned end-credits scene would show a "Village Loser" NPC (the hunched-over villager character type, literally named "loser" in the data files) walking through the parking lot. The turrets wouldn't fire — implying the player's actions had disabled them — and the loser would get in the Viper and drive off. Cut for time constraints and because "it's not aspirational."
The Abbey of Lost Knowledge (Fallout 2)
Cain designed this location for Fallout 2, directly inspired by Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. A monastery north of Vault City, it would house monks who copied, illustrated, and preserved technical manuals, blueprints, and specifications — even more directly referencing the novel than the Brotherhood of Steel did.
The Abbey differed from the Brotherhood philosophically: while the Brotherhood hoarded technology to keep it from people, the Abbey welcomed anyone to visit and read their materials, asking only that nothing be taken or damaged.
Planned quest lines included:
- Returning to the Abbey to find critical information for advancing other quests
- The Brotherhood of Steel discovering the Abbey and wanting to confiscate everything, with the pacifist monks asking the player to intervene
The content was designed but never implemented, and Cain isn't sure why.
The Lesson: Editing Your Ideas
Cain identifies four reasons content gets cut:
- Doesn't fit the game's established aesthetic or goals
- Not finished in time for ship
- Too buggy to include reliably
- Unknown reasons — sometimes things just don't make it
The hardest skill, he emphasizes, is recognizing that a good idea isn't necessarily good for your game. In later projects, he adopted Josh Sawyer's practice of putting explicit design goals at the top of design documents. This reframes feature debates productively: you either argue whether a feature achieves the stated goal, or you argue whether the goal itself is wrong — two very different and more useful discussions.