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. In this iteration, Fallout had a bunch of different characteristics between skills, advantages, disadvantages, and quirks, all of which had to be rendered in a way the player could understand at a glance.

"For every single one of those characteristics, we had to make an icon, because the game used the icons when the skill or advantage or disadvantage was displayed," OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains in a new YouTube video. "We used an icon next to its name so that later on, if something happened related to that skill in places we didn't have a lot of room for text, we could use the icon."

The work of creating all those icons fell to an artist named Arlene Summers, whose contributions to this original version of Fallout have apparently gone largely uncredited for all these years. "I think there were over a hundred, maybe close to 200 when you summed up all the different things," Cain says.

Cain was starting to lose his color vision around this time, so he encouraged Summers not to use color as a differentiator for the icons.

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