Fallout's iconic Vault Boy exists because the devs struggled to solve an old-school RPG problem

Even as Fallout has evolved into a mega-franchise with massively popular open-world games and TV show spin-offs, certain elements of the original 1997 RPG remain – things like the SPECIAL stat system and the iconic Vault Boy mascot. As it turns out, these two creations were very closely related. Fallout was originally meant to use the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS), a tabletop RPG system published by Steve Jackson Games. He sketched it up and we all thought it was really cool." Artist George Almond further refined the Vault Boy design, and the job of actually drawing all the final Vault Boy icons fell to fellow artist Tramell Ray Isaac "He drew hundreds of these things," Cain says.