April 12, 2024: With the launch of the Fallout TV show, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to reshare some of our classic Fallout coverage. This post was originally published in October of 2017.
Tim Cain was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity – it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird‘, he thought. Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a meter of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’
In the years since, Bethesda has taken Fallout into first-person, online, and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognizable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.
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