How Fallout Got Its Name

1. The Difficulty of Naming a Game

Tim Cain opens by emphasizing how surprisingly hard it is to name a new game. A name needs to capture the essence of the game in one or two words, avoid words already overused in the industry (like "dark," "shadow," and "blood"), not form an embarrassing acronym, and not carry unwanted connotations. He jokes about "Fallout Online" abbreviating to "FOOL" — something he flagged as a problem.

1.1. Arcanum's Cautionary Subtitle

As an aside, Tim notes that he came up with Arcanum's subtitle — "Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura" — which he thought was cool at the time but has since been widely mocked. Lesson learned on naming games.

2. The Evolution of Working Titles

Before it was Fallout, the game cycled through several internal names corresponding to its development phases:

• Testbed — Tim's earliest solo prototyping phase, when he was building different engines (voxel, 3D, sprite). Builds were simply named testbed1, testbed2, testbed3.
• GURPS — After acquiring the GURPS license, the executable became gurps.exe and the team was called "Team GURPS."
• Vault 13 — Once the setting took shape, the game was renamed Vault 13, producing vault13.exe. Tim quickly realized this was a dead-end name: what would the sequel be? "Vault 13 2"? "Vault 14"? "More Vault 13"? "Beyond Vault 13"?

This realization, around mid-1996, prompted the formal search for a real name.

3. The Brainstorming Session

On June 19, 1996, Tim gathered the team in a conference room for a no-critique brainstorming session. His notes from that day begin: "This has been an exceptionally difficult time to find a name for this game that is both catchy and tells somewhat about the premise of the game." The cool nuclear-war words — apocalypse, holocaust, Armageddon, aftermath, Wasteland — were either already taken or had religious connotations they wanted to avoid.

3.1. The Full List of Rejected Names

The 90-minute session produced these candidates:

• The Vault
• Ground-Zero (with dash)
• Survivors
• Warriors of the Apocalypse
• Rad Storm (Tim thinks this one was his)
• Nuclear Winter
• Doomsday Warrior
• After the Bomb
• Hiroshima Revisited
• Vault 13 (yes, someone re-suggested it)
• Remains of the Day
• Devastated Earth
• Fallout (buried in the middle of the list)
• Nuclear Summer
• Dying Earth (Tim knew about Jack Vance and stayed quiet, knowing it wouldn't fly)
• Out of the Vault
• Ground Zero (no dash — someone insisted on the distinction)
• The Rust Age (Tim attributes this to Leonard Boyarsky, who "liked the word rust")
• Future Past
• Dead Glow
• After Effects (spelled both as "Effects" and "FX")
• Devolution
• Earth A.D. (Tim noted this would apply to any game set after year zero)
• The Surface
• The Surfacing
• Moribund World (attributed to Jason Anderson)
• Vault 666
• World Gone Mad
• Static Age
• The Chosen Ones
• The New World
• The World Outside
• The Vault
• After the Collapse
• Return to the World
• Outside
• Wasteland 2 (thrown out as the session wrapped up)

3.2. Marketing's Contribution

After Tim mentioned the naming effort in a producer meeting, Interplay's marketing department held their own brainstorm and sent over their suggestions: Firestorm, Ravaged, Eradicated, Annihilation, Desiccated, Consumed, Biohazard, Mutilation, Scarred Earth, and Further Into the Wasteland.

4. Brian Fargo Names the Game

Tim presented what he thought were the best candidates to Brian Fargo. He doesn't remember which ones he highlighted, and notably doesn't think he pushed "Fallout" — his programmer brain objected that there wouldn't literally be radioactive fallout 80 years after the war.

The next day, Brian came back and said simply: "Why don't you just name it Fallout? It's a great name. It's one word. It probably won't even be shortened." (Tim notes Brian underestimated the internet — people immediately shortened it to "FO.")

Tim was initially hesitant but slept on it. The next morning he woke up thinking "Fallout's actually a really good name." He brought it to the team and everyone loved it — it was the unanimous number one choice.

5. Why "Fallout" Works

Tim credits Brian Fargo for recognizing what made the name perfect:

• Short and punchy — one word, easy to remember
• Evocative — immediately signals a post-apocalyptic setting, and not a cheerful one
• Sequel-friendly — Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout 4 all work naturally
• No unwanted baggage — no religious connotations, not already taken

Tim deliberately chose not to call the first game "Fallout 1," finding it presumptuous to assume there'd be a sequel. To him, the original is simply "Fallout."

6. The Slow Transition

Even after the name was chosen, it took weeks before Tim actually changed the build system to produce fallout.exe — it was still outputting gurps.exe or testbed.exe. The team was also building DOS, Windows, and Mac versions simultaneously, which eventually became falloutd.exe (DOS), falloutw.exe (Windows), and falloutm.exe (Mac).

7. Reflections on Later Naming

Tim reflects that Fallout's naming was, in hindsight, the easiest naming process he ever went through. Every subsequent new IP involved drawn-out meetings, copyright searches, and people flagging that proposed names were too close to existing books, movies, or other games.

Source: Tim Cain — "How Fallout Got Its Name"

8. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBptoe19IcY