The cursed Vault Boy drawing Fallout creators would like to forget, but fans never will

Fallout’s colorful mascot Vault Boy stands in stark contrast to the grim, violent, post-apocalyptic reality of the role-playing game franchise. Originally inspired by the Chance cards from the board game Monopoly and 1950s-era cartoons, the blue-and-yellow jumpsuited cartoon character was designed to illustrate how perks and abilities worked in Fallout games.

Much of the humor around Vault Boy comes from the weird and macabre situations the cheery Vault-Tec mascot finds himself in. Early Fallout games showed Vault Boy as a grave robber, slaver, mass murderer, and frequent sex-haver when the player gained a “reputation” by performing certain in-game feats. But one Vault Boy cartoon from Fallout 2 was so offensive in its design, its creators pulled it from the game — which turned it into one of the most fabled bits of iconography in the series.

Child Killer is a reputation status in Fallout and Fallout 2 that is rewarded to the player after killing multiple child NPCs. The unused illustration for Child Killer depicts Vault Boy delivering a swift kick to the pregnant belly of a woman — who is wearing a dress with the word “baby” printed on the bust and a downward-pointing arrow directed at her unborn child to make it explicitly clear what’s occurring. Vault Boy is smiling in the Child Killer drawing, while his victim looks shocked.

Former Interplay Entertainment artist Brian Menze exposed the original, unused Child Killer illustration to the wider world in 2010, when he uploaded his drawing of Vault Boy to DeviantArt. In a description of the piece (which was quickly deleted), Menze said the image “was unused and the only Vault Boy image to ever be cut from Fallout 2. (I’m sure you can figure out why).” Reportedly, another illustration of Vault Boy masturbating on the toilet was also cut from the game, despite what Menze says.

“I remember when I got the request to do a perk illustration for ‘child killer’ that there would be no way to keep [it] from being offensive,” Menze wrote in 2010. “I mean really! How do you make an illustration of ‘child killer’ and keep it from being offensive? Anyway for some reason, I thought this was the least offensive way to do it. I have no idea what I was thinking. Even the designer who requested it realized it was a bad idea, so we nixed it. Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I drew this.”

The Child Killer reputation still exists in Fallout 2; it just uses a different illustration of Vault Boy running from an angry mob. Fans of the original, unused illustration can re-add it to the classic games using mods.

The option to kill children in Fallout 2 was only available in some versions of the game, according to its creators.

“We allowed it,” recalled original Fallout creator Tim Cain in a presentation at GDC 2012. “We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to have kids in the game. If you shoot them, it’s a huge penalty to karma, you’re really disliked, there are places that won’t sell to you, there are people that will shoot you on sight,’ and we thought people can decide what they want to do. This of course contributed to our M rating, however. Europe said no. They wouldn’t even sell the game if there were children in the game. We didn’t have time to rewrite all the quests, [so] we just deleted kids off the disc. Things are there that reference children; you just never see children.”

Every few years, the Child Killer reputation illustration reemerges as a new discovery for a Fallout fan. Sometimes, it’s adapted for a meme format, gender-swapped, or made into a piece of unofficial merchandise. The Child Killer reputation hasn’t carried over into the Bethesda Softworks era of Fallout — meaning Fallout 3 and beyond — but its tiny, amusing legacy as one of the franchise’s most offensive images manages to endure with its most ardent fans.