Tim Cain has revealed how many vaults the developers planned to create in the first Fallout, but he believes that the number of vaults that were created was much lower.

Cain is a veteran programmer and RPG designer, and is now admittedly semi-retired from the gaming industry. That’s why he runs his YouTube channel, where he shares a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. For example, we learned that Interplay’s developers originally expected 1,000 Vault Tec vaults in the United States, but that was just his idea, so it didn’t end up being credible information that we’d see in the franchise universe.

“The only reason that pin even made it into the original game was because when Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout 1’s lead artist] was making the vault suit, he asked me how many numbers he had to have on the back. I was like, well, let’s just say it’s a round number, it’s a thousand. I’m a programmer, I start counting from zero, three digits. According to Leonard, [the Fallout art team] just made the thirteen-star American flag because it looked cool. If each of those vaults held about a thousand people, that’s only a million people being saved in the Vault Tec vaults, which is way less than the population we imagined.

Fallout 1 and 2 combined only had about four to six vaults that were clearly defined, and that’s if you count the unnumbered ones, like whatever Harold’s vault was. The conclusion is that Vault Tec did not build all 1,000 vaults, they didn’t even come close. Vault Tec built less than half, probably far less than the vaults they were supposed to,” Cain said. Cain said.

Theoretically, there should be at least 20 vaults in the first two Fallout games, and according to the wiki, there are 41 if you include the games and TV show, not counting the two shown in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, the one on display in the Fallout 3 Tech Museum, and Mr. House’s Securitron Bunker in Fallout New Vegas.

So the reality is pretty far from what was imagined.

Source: PCGamer