Featured Image Credit: Bethesda Entertainment
The Fallout series has built up an impressively deep lore over the course of its major releases, covering hundreds years of history since the bombs dropped and wiped out most of humanity in an alternate version of 2077.
For those of you who don't know, the Fallout timeline splits from our own shortly after the Second World War. There are several key differences, including the fact that the humans in Fallout's timeline invested their efforts much more readily into nuclear power, leading to cars and their ilk being powered directly using nuclear reactions. Equally, they favoured the transistor over the microchip, leading to those big bulky pre-war appliances you see when you play.
That obsession with the nuclear unfortunately pushed the world towards a major conflagration, until the first nukes were dropped in 2077, with the world as they knew it falling apart shortly afterwards.
The only advantage civilians had is that nuclear war was coming for some time, so there was a major effort to build bomb-proof vaults, leading Vault-Tec to become the most valuable company in the world.
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What most of the unfortunate souls going into the vaults didn't know, was that those locations were to be used as centres for human experimentation of all kinds, from the chemical to the social. Almost all of them were very unpleasant, but some stand out as particularly cruel.
In Fallout 4, one is very much in that latter category, and it's a haunting place to explore in-game. And what better day to explore this than the Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition launch day?
Located beneath the Malden Middle School in the wider district of Malden in the Commonwealth, Vault 75 was initially shown to the public as a place where the schoolchildren could safely retreat to if the bombs dropped while they were getting an education.
So far, so admirable (if a little dystopian), but it's true purpose wouldn't emerge until the big day itself. The day the bombs dropped in 2077, all of the children, teachers and their parents made their way down to the vault as planned. Upon exiting, the children were separated from the adults, with the latter being taken for orientation. What that actually amounted to was the entire adult population being summarily executed.
The true purpose of the vault was, as is so often the case, to experiment on human genetics using selective breeding, genetic modification and hormonal treatments. Additionally, new generations of children were created by experimenting on human embryos were experimented upon and cultivated.
The vault was always designed to be sealed for some time, and the children were raised to fear the potential dangers of the outside world, known as "Uptopland".
Those children who were deemed exceptional, either physically or mentally, were "harvested" when they turned 18 (a fancy way of saying killed to further the genome experiment).
A middle group who were not as fit (though still somewhat intelligent) were the lucky ones, being added to the vault's science team after they turned 18. Those who were not deemed to be of a sufficient standard, were simply killed when they turned 18 and incinerated.
At some point, the vault was opened and the inhabitants left, but they left a stain on the site that will always resonate as you explore its cavernous halls.
