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Right at the start of episode one, Vault 33's monitors flash up that familiar 'Please Stand By' card before the wedding kicks off. It's the same holding screen the games have used for decades on their loading and title screens, so if you've ever booted up a Fallout game you'll have seen this exact graphic staring back at you before.
The hollow-eyed raiders that Maximus and Lucy scrap with on the bridge aren't just generic bandits, they're Fiends, a chem-addicted faction that made their debut in Fallout: New Vegas. In the games they're famous for attacking anything that moves, and the show keeps that same feral, no-negotiation energy.
Squint at the season two poster and you can pick out the Lucky 38, Mr. House's iconic tower from Fallout: New Vegas, sitting in the background haze. Fans have also spotted what looks like The Tops and a sliver of Gomorrah tucked into the skyline, so the marketing team was clearly having fun rewarding people who know their Strip casinos.
For season two, production shifted away from Namibia and New York entirely, relocating to California so the team could recreate the neon ruins of New Vegas. The shift also let the crew build out locations more familiar from Fallout: New Vegas, following on from that final season one shot teasing the Strip.
Obsidian only had about a year and a half to build the entire game, which is nuts when you think most RPGs of that size take three or four years minimum. Director Josh Sawyer has said a couple of those months were eaten up just on early planning, so the actual build time was even tighter. It's honestly a big part of why the game shipped a little rough around the edges, but also why the writing feels so sharp and focused.
Bethesda's contract with Obsidian included a big bonus if the game hit a certain Metacritic score. New Vegas came in one single point below that target, which meant Obsidian lost out on a large chunk of the payout despite the game becoming a fan favourite. It's one of those stories that gets brought up constantly whenever people talk about how brutal review-score bonus clauses can be for developers.
Long before New Vegas existed, Black Isle was working on a game called Van Buren that got cancelled. A surprising amount of that scrapped project made it into New Vegas anyway, most notably Caesar's Legion, which was originally written for Van Buren. Even the Big Empty from Old World Blues traces back to an early Van Buren location idea.
Ulysses, the mysterious antagonist from the Lonesome Road DLC, was originally written to be a companion you could recruit in the base game. He got cut for time, but the personality stuck around and shaped who he became later. If he'd made it in as planned, he'd have been the only companion who actually sympathised with Caesar's Legion while still distrusting the NCR, which would have made for some interesting party banter.
There were plans at one point for actual romance mechanics between the player and companions, but the idea got dropped early in development. You can still see a trace of it in the companion roster though, since the four human companions work out to two men and two women, with one of each being gay, so the game was clearly built with the option in mind before it was scrapped.
Ron Perlman opens New Vegas the same way he's opened every mainline Fallout game since the 1997 original, with that instantly recognisable 'war never changes' narration. By this point it's basically the voice of the whole franchise, and it's wild to think Bethesda kept bringing him back across totally different developers and console generations.
