Tim Cain’s had a storied career, hasn’t he? The man’s had a hand in pretty much all of my favourite games: Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity, and Tyranny. Now the legendary game designer has a new hobby: Dropping (in the inimitable words of PCG’s Ted Litchfield) “heater after heater” of classic RPG development lore over on his YouTube channel.

One of those heaters is the absolutely irresistible “The true purpose of vaults in Fallout,” wherein Cain drops the knowledge that—in his original conception at the end of Fallout 1—the vaults were basically testbeds for a starship.

“If you ever read reports from the ’50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange,” said Cain, “there basically is no Earth to come back to”. That cheery thought gave him an idea, “Maybe that was the whole point: There is no Earth to come back to”.

“So the head of the Enclave”—Fall…