Fallout Show Explains the Iconic Vault Boy Mascot’s Origin Story

Months before Amazon’s Fallout series released, it came out in discussions about the show that it would finally give an origin story to the iconic Vault Boy mascot that we see throughout the games. Most commonly seen as a cheerful fella giving a thumbs up to anyone who passes by his posters, the Vault Boy is used in perks, branding, memes, and is as much a cherished part of the Fallout universe as Nuka-Cola and bottle caps. As such, Fallout fans were understandably hesitant to hear that the Fallout TV show – which is considered canon, according to Bethesda’s Todd Howard – would be in charge of giving the Vault Boy a story.

But as we’ve seen from the reviews for the Fallout show thus far, it’s been praised for handling the source material with care, and the same can be said for its Vault Boy origin story. While Fallout fans can of course reject the Vault Boy story if they want, the peppy mascot now has an origin that should be fairly inoffensive to even the staunchest of lorekeepers.

The origin story for Vault-Tec’s Vault Boy is explained in full below, though it should go without saying this explanation spoilers for the Fallout show.

Vault-Tec’s Vault Boy Origins, Explained

In the very first episode of Fallout, we see a pre-war birthday party taking place where movie star Cooper Howard (who becomes the Ghoul in the “present-day” Fallout story) makes an appearance with his daughter, Janey. Cooper is asked by the partygoers to do his signature thumbs up pose for a picture, but he refuses given the tension felt everywhere amid threats of war and nuclear assaults.

Explaining the post to Janey, Cooper says the thumb trick is something he learned in the military.

“Well back when I was in the Marines, they taught us that if they ever drop a really big bomb, they told us to hold up your thumb just like this,” he said. “And if the cloud is smaller than your thumb, you run for the hills.”

Janey asks what to do if the cloud was bigger, and Cooper says “they told us not to bother running.”

Most Fallout fans will know that that’s a long-running explanation for why the Vault Boy is posing that way, especially because he’s squinting one eye. However, those behind the earliest iterations of the Fallout series have refuted this claim as a myth, so seeing that canonized in the show would be a disappointing turn of events that ignores those assertions from Interplay founder Brian Fargo and others.

Thankfully, however, that’s not the case – at least not entirely. In the third episode, we see that Cooper has been enlisted by his wife, Barb, to promote Vault-Tec Vaults in some ads. Barb works for Vault-Tec, and it’s been determined that having a high-profile actor like Cooper endorse the Vaults would be beneficial even if he draws criticism from his peers for that choice.

During his Vault-Tec photoshoot where he poses in a Vault jumpsuit, Cooper tries out a few different poses, but you can tell he hasn’t really found one that clicks yet. He then suggests a thumbs up pose instead, an idea that the Vault-Tec handlers are all about. He poses as shown in the image below, and in doing so, we learn that Cooper Howard is the inspiration for the Vault Boy we know today.

Did Cooper suggest the pose because of his lessons learned in the Marines? Perhaps, but it’s never explicitly said. We only know that he decided on a thumbs up pose, and the rest was quite literally history. It’s evident as the show goes on, however, that he regrets the Vault-Tec endorsement as evidenced by him blowing a hole in a Vault Boy billboard right before we learn of the mascot’s backstory.

This isn’t the only Fallout revelation that comes from the Amazon show, so Fallout fans will want to keep watching to unearth more secrets (or just tune into our Fallout coverage to learn more).