Vault-Tec: the Company That Built Fallout's Vaults

Vault-Tec is the pre-war American company that designed and built the Vaults, the underground shelters meant to save people from nuclear war. Its smiling mascot, Vault Boy, is the face of the whole Fallout series. Behind the adverts, most of its Vaults were experiments on the people sealed inside, and the TV series shows its executives planning to profit from the end of the world. (Fallout 3; Fallout 4; Fallout, "The Beginning")

What Vault-Tec sold#

On paper, Vault-Tec was in the business of survival. It built huge underground Vaults with their own power, water and air, sold places in them, and filled them with its own technology. The Vault Dweller's whole story in Fallout begins with a Vault-Tec part failing: Vault 13's water chip breaks, and someone has to go outside for a replacement. (Fallout)

Vault-Tec also made the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K., a device meant to help Vault dwellers rebuild civilisation after leaving. The Chosen One searches for one in Fallout 2, and in Fallout 3 a G.E.C.K. from Vault 87 is what makes Project Purity work. (Fallout 2; Fallout 3)

Some Vaults did what they promised. Vault 8 opened as planned, and its people founded Vault City. In Fallout 4, a Vault-Tec salesman knocks on the Sole Survivor's door on the morning of the war and signs the family up for Vault 111, which is why they're able to run there when the sirens go off. (Fallout 2; Fallout 4)

The Vault experiments#

Most Vaults were tests on their residents. The games reveal them one at a time. (Fallout 3; Fallout: New Vegas; Fallout 4)

• Vault 101, the Lone Wanderer's home, was never meant to open, and its overseer rules over a population that believes the outside is death. (Fallout 3)
• Vault 106 released psychoactive drugs into its air supply, and Vault 112 put its residents into a virtual world controlled by its overseer, Dr. Stanislaus Braun. Vault 108 was filled with clones of one man, all named Gary. (Fallout 3)
• Vault 11's residents were told they had to sacrifice one person every year or the Vault would be destroyed. (Fallout: New Vegas)
• Vault 111's residents were frozen in cryogenic pods without being told, and Vault 81 studied a disease on its residents in a hidden section. (Fallout 4)

Fallout 76 adds a control Vault. Vault 76 was one of the few with no secret experiment, and its residents emerged on Reclamation Day in 2102 to resettle Appalachia. The game also shows Vault-Tec University in Morgantown, the company's own college. (Fallout 76)

Vault-Tec in the TV series#

The series makes Vault-Tec's executives characters. Cooper Howard, a Western film star, does adverts for the company before the war, and his wife Barb is one of its executives. (Fallout, "The Radio")

In the season one finale, Cooper listens in on a Vault-Tec meeting through a bug in Barb's Pip-Boy. Barb and Bud Askins host leaders from RobCo, West Tek, Big MT and REPCONN, including Robert House. When House asks how Vault-Tec will make sure its investment pays off, Barb says the company will drop the bombs itself. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

The same episode reveals the plan at the heart of the show. Vault 31 holds frozen Vault-Tec junior managers in Bud's "Bud's Buds" programme, woken one at a time to run Vaults 32 and 33. Hank MacLean, overseer of Vault 33, is one of them, and he destroyed Shady Sands with a nuclear warhead. Bud himself survives as a brain in a robot body. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

Season two shows the bombing of Shady Sands in a flashback, delivered by a wastelander with a black box implanted in his neck. It also opens a Vault-Tec "management Vault" under Las Vegas. There, Mr. House tells the Ghoul that the Vault was built for Vault-Tec's investors, the Enclave, and that he never saw them coming. (Fallout, "The Golden Rule"; Fallout, "The Strip")

The finale leaves Vault-Tec's plan still running. Steph, Hank's wife, uses an Enclave Pip-Boy to ask for "Phase 2" to begin, and the Enclave receives the message. The Ghoul finds that Barb and their daughter's cryo pods in the Las Vegas Vault are empty, with a postcard suggesting they went to Colorado. (Fallout, "The Strip")