Fallout 4 is an open-world role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios. In it, the player begins as a parent and spouse in the year 2077, but then must enter Vault 111 to survive the nuclear apocalypse. The player becomes the last remaining survivor of Vault 111 as he/she emerges into the nuclear wasteland in 2287, amidst the ruins of the city of Boston.
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Buried in holotapes across the Commonwealth is a playable Pip-Boy game called Red Menace, which is basically Bethesda's tribute to the original Donkey Kong. It's easy to overlook since you have to actually find and load the holotape yourself, but it's a proper little arcade throwback hiding in your wrist computer.
That terrifying Super Mutant Behemoth guarding the pond in Boston Common used to be a man named Edward Swann, a convict who volunteered for prisoner reduction tests and ended up dosed with FEV. His journal entries chart the whole grim decline, starting with a boost to strength and intelligence, then a slow collapse into the mindless rage monster you eventually fight.
Vault 95 was pitched to its residents as a rehab facility for chem addicts, but Vault-Tec quietly stashed a huge cache of drugs inside as part of the experiment. Once people found it, things fell apart fast - staff were killed and the vault dwellers overdosed in waves. You can still find their bodies slumped around the vault today, chems scattered nearby.
Vault 114 was meant to be a haven for the Commonwealth's wealthiest, but the overseer picked to run it was a homeless man with no leadership experience and some fairly severe schizophrenic tendencies, nicknamed Soupcan Harry. It was less a shelter and more a study in what happens when the privileged get put under a lunatic's charge, and the body count in there tells you how that went.
Deacon's laid-back charm hides a genuinely dark past. He used to run with a synth-hating gang called the University Point Deathclaws, until the group killed a synth who turned out to be a real human. Disgusted, Deacon walked away, settled down and got married, only for his old gang to track him down and kill his wife, revealing in the process that she'd been a synth the whole time. It's why he ended up working for the Railroad.
Curie starts life as a Mr. Handy-style robot before transferring her mind into a synth body so she can properly research what it means to be human. It's a lovely arc on its own, but there's a weirder wrinkle buried in the game's lore: every generation 3 synth, Curie included, is built from genetic material derived from your character's son, Shaun.
Those rusted-out, exploding cars scattered across the Commonwealth aren't random Bethesda design - they're modeled on the Ford Nucleon, a real 1950s concept car that would have run on a small nuclear reactor. It fits the franchise's whole retro-futuristic vibe a little too perfectly.
Codsworth can recognise and say almost a thousand pre-recorded player names, which is already a lot of work for a video game companion. On top of the published list floating around online, the developers quietly snuck in a handful of extra names players only discovered through trial, error, and a lot of save-scumming.
Fallout 4's first piece of concept art was made in 2009, about a week after Fallout 3's final DLC wrapped up, meaning the game had already been quietly cooking for roughly seven years by the time it launched in 2015. Lead artist Istvan Pely stuck with the Fallout concept work rather than moving onto Skyrim with the rest of the team.
Before building any of Fallout 4 itself, the team's first move on the new console hardware was porting Skyrim to the Xbox One, purely as a way of learning the console's capabilities and figuring out the new renderer they'd need. Todd Howard has joked that fans shouldn't get too excited about that particular port.
