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The Fallout TV show has revived an ancient argument about Vault Boy’s thumbLook to windward
Look to windward
Image credit:Amazon
Image credit:Amazon
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Microsoft
Still, there’s some excitement in the shape of Aaron Moten’s Maximus, a rapidly disillusioned Brotherhood Of Steel trainee, and Walton Goggins’s The Ghoul, a figure from before the Fall who is as good at gunslinging as he is chewing the scenery. And there’s intrigue in the fact that the Fallout TV show has absent-mindedly resurfaced an argument between Fallout players and fans that goes back years. Before I get to that, though, here are some thoughts from Bethesda boss Todd Howard.
“You know, as I think about the franchise, the one thing the show is able to do that we were really never able to do in the games and the ways that we would have loved, is to show so much of the past, because that’s one of the things that really makes the world of Fallout special,” he went on. “And the way the show mines that with [Walton Goggins’s] character, and the other things that occur in the past, filling in all those things with Vault-Tec - I don’t want to give any spoilers, but they just did so many great things. And the way we discussed it, there was so much to mine there in the franchise, that would be both additive to it and also really, really special, if you’re already a fan of the series.”
Fallout - Official Trailer | Prime VideoWatch on YouTube
Fallout - Official Trailer | Prime Video
I probably should have known this as a fairly seasoned pre- and post-Bethesda-acquisition Fallout player, but it turns out people have been arguing about Vault Boy’s thumb since the days of the original Black Isle and Interplay CRPGs. The association with measuring mushroom clouds is apocryphal. It has been repeatedly debunked: in 2013, former Interplay head of development Brian Fargotold the Twitterersthat “the vault boy simply has a positive attitude”. In 2015, Vault Boy’s artist Trammel Ray Isaacreiteratedthat “it’s got nothing to do with measuring the cloud”. Nonetheless, theclaim keeps resurfacing, in what I consider a mildly interesting show of how history may be cancelled and overwritten even in the absence of, say, a worldwide nuclear exchange.
Image credit:Microsoft
The Inverse article does, however, leave room for another interpretation, one that I will now gleefully hand forward to the next generation of players and journalists arguing about Fallout lore. Two of the researchers quoted point out that wind direction is of vital importance when fleeing an atomic blast - if you’re downwind, all that icky radiation will come down squarely on your head, making it far more sensible to find shelter than flee. Perhaps, then, what Vault Boy is really doing with his thumbs-up is testing the wind? There we go, the seed has been sown. Let’s pick this conversation up again when Fallout 5 releases in 10 years time and/or in the aftermath of an actual nuclear war.
Season one of Fallout launches onPrime Videofrom April 11th.
