The story of Vault-Tec

 Vault-Tec Calling!

Vault-Tec serves as one of the most recognisable and important symbols of the Fallout Mythos; not only creating the large metal vaults which serves as kicking off points for the majority of the Fallout adventures, but also coining the ever-present 'Vault-boy' marketing mascot who has appeared in every single main-series Fallout game to date and is now a recognisable symbol of the series as a whole. Through Steam his face is literally the default Icon for Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But despite this important to the Fallout brand, even after 5 mainline entries there are still many mysteries surrounding the structure of this company, what the chief goals were and just who it was they were involved with. Although there are plenty of sources of lore, some of which border on contradictory, and enter destroyed research facilities' worth of speculation.

Vault-Tec famously has no founder yet revealed in the series, which is a huge roadblock when trying to deduce their founding principles, but we do know they've been an active company since at least the 2030's ('Fallout: 76'), decades before the Sino-American conflict which would lead to the disastrous 'Great War'. As such it seems that Vault-Tec was founded as a precautionary measure against the direction America was heading, with it's decades of consumption dragging down the super-power into an impending crisis of scarce resources. ('Fallout 4') We know that Vault-Tec boasted significant ties to the US Government, to the point where the US would eventually rely on Vault-Tec's services in order to construct a Vault specifically to house the unnamed 'Last President of the United States'. (Fallout 2) As such, we might make a solid assumption that the US government themselves might have at least bankrolled this institution into being as a Plan-B, if the desperate grasping measures of 'alternative fuel sources' and 'forced annexation', and eventually 'global war', did not turn out in their favour.

Whatever their origins, Vault-Tec was defined by the production of highly effective, and prohibitively expensive (Fallout 3), underground Fallout Vaults designed not only to resist impending nuclear Armageddon, but to serve as functioning living spaces for the inhabitants to persist within for generations until the radiation levels outside died down enough for those initial resident's descendants to re-enter the atmosphere(Fallout 3). Or at least, this was the supposed purpose that had been fed to public in order to get the rich and influential to sign up for placements in the Vault, the truth would end up being much more insidious and potentially reveal a whole new shade to the Vault-Tec company. Because yes; most all of these Vaults were designed in order to resist the bombs, but most wanted to do far more to their citizens than just keep them safe from the chaotic death of modern society.

Secretly, most of the Vaults actually served as petri-dishes for experiments to be run on their inhabitants, vast, covert, experiments that would play out over the span of decades, and nearly all of which breach the constraints of scientific ethics. Vault 11 featured a sacrificial altar on which Residents were expected to give up their loved ones year after year to study the effects it would have on them as a societal unit, and how long it would take for them to say no ('Fallout: New Vegas'). Vault 111 cryogenically froze their inhabitants without their knowledge in order to study the effects of long-term cryo-stasis (Fallout 4). Or how about when they pumped Vault 92 with constant white noise in order to induce aggression? (Fallout 3) Or dumped a whole mess of Vault-dwellers who were told they were the 'best' and 'brightest' in the country into a plot of the wasteland full to the prim of automatically restocking nuclear missile silos and just waited to see how soon they'd start blowing each other up. (Fallout 76)

This obvious lack of moral operating ethics makes it more than likely that Vault-Tec owned, or at least partially run, by the Enclave. Secretive branch of elitist within the US government who would try to 'take back America' after the bombs fell. This Enclave made use of Vault-Tec facilities in order preserve the upper echelons of government from nuclear fire, and their obsessions with experimentations on human test subjects (Fallout 3) neatly slides into the same sort of wheelhouse as what Vault-Tec themselves were up to. Actually there has never been an explicit canonical link drawn between the Enclave and the management of Vault-Tec, no matter how obvious the connection sounds; so until that changes we just have to except there are two government-tied secretive organisations that treat humanity like silly putty, just with slightly differing approaches. (Kidnapping and experimenting on test subjects is a tad more aggressive on The Enclave's part, I will agree.)

What I always found curious about the whole Vault-Tec concept is thus; if most of these experiments were designed to observe how humans reacted under specified conditions in the context of a nuclear shelter environment, how did the Vault-Tec management expect to collect and make use of this data? Is there some undiscovered observation Vault somewhere full of generational Vault-Tec scientists who have been watching the Vaults secret all these years? Perhaps, but I think the real solution is much more simple. The US government only allowed tensions to spark to the point of nuclear warfare because bad intel gave the brass the impression that a nuclear attack from China would only result in 40% of the country being destroyed, whilst an American retaliation would totally obliterate China. Considering Vault-Tec's ties to the government, and assuming the Enclave funding theory holds water, the Vaults may have been seen as a exploitation measure to conduct unethical experiments on a society of people who thought the world had ended, whilst the US recovers from their disaster on the surface. (Which might also go someway to explain many Vault's super stringent 'don't leave until a specified time frame' rules) Of course, then the world actually ended for real and those plans were sort of scuppered.

One avenue of Vault-Tec, or Vault technology in general, that the series has even flirted with addressing is whether or not China has an equivalent. In the lore there are plenty of examples of China and America trying to ape the other's technology, and they can never perfectly reverse engineer the other's accomplishments. But if China had it's own Vaults, or more likely a different alternative to surviving the nuclear holocaust (like giant rad-free bubble cities or something) then there could be whole societies of Fallout survivors just across the sea which we haven't even begun to explore yet. But whilst the series remains sternly married to Americana, I suppose we never will get to explore this most interesting segment of the Fallout universe.

Vault-Tec is a company of secrets and scandal, buried under wrought-iron, concrete rivers and atomic ash. After 5 Fallout games prominently featuring them, we still don't even have a clear idea of their origins, and so many blank spaces in their motives makes them a curious subject of speculation to this day. I think there's a real space of exploration to be done from this angle of Fallout lore, and I'd love a TV show or webcomic that really fleshed out their role from that fundamental angle we're still missing, to help us frame the bigger picture. Although in that same breath, I acknowledge sometimes the mystery is everything, and never quite knowing why the powers that be decided to clone a guy called Garry 99 times in their Vault (Fallout 3) is better than finding out.