You Won't Hear About Fallout's Vault 77 From Any Game or TV Series. And That's Pity, Since It's Good Fuel for Nightmares

Source: Wizards of the Coast / Bethesda Softworks

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Some time ago, we began a series of posts expanding players' knowledge about the vaults known from Fallout, which may not have taken the leading role in the story, but still managed to send chills down players' spines with their atmosphere.

The vault we will take you to today will be a bit less populated, adding to the somber atmosphere it represents.

Dollhouse for one

Vault 77 is unique in that it doesn't physically appear in any Fallout game. It was featured in the official webcomic One Man, and a Crate of Puppets released as part of the promotion for Fallout 3. As the name of the story suggests, the shelter's resident was only one man.

A man whose name was unknown, later identified as Puppet Man, was locked in Vault 77 as atomic bombs started to descend on the United States. Despite pleading for other residents to be brought inside, Puppet Man remained the only inhabitant of the vault, where he spent the following year.

Source: Bethesda Softworks

After fifteen months, Puppet Man encountered a box full of puppets, which quickly became his new friends. The man created an entire doll civilization, which included, among others, a king and a reverend (in the form of a dog). Utopia began to collapse in late March 2079, when Puppet Man was summoned by a puppet made in the image of Vault Boy.

Soon after that, the puppet king was "murdered," which Vault Boy claimed was a collaborative act between him and Puppet Man. The guilty managed to escape from the vault, most likely due to the fact that Vault-Tec had already collected all the necessary information for its experiment.

The story ends with Puppet Man being captured by slave hunters who ignore his warnings about the sinister puppet - as a result, the "puppet" brutally kills the bandits, thus extending his murderous tendencies beyond the safety of the vault walls.

What can we learn about Vault 77 from the games?

As we mentioned earlier, Vault 77 doesn't appear in any of the Fallout games, including the TV series adaptation. So, we don't know the exact location of the vault, but we can infer that it is situated in a radiation-affected desert wasteland where the weather isn't influenced by the season.

Furthermore, as we stroll through the Paradise Falls shopping center in Fallout 3, we might encounter an abandoned suit with the number 77, along with a tape containing the following message:

Puppet Man's final destiny remains a mystery. While the paths probably took him to Paradise Falls, he definitely hadn't been there in a long time. The end of the comic suggests that the inhabitant of vault 77 has gone completely mad, wandering the wastelands in the company of a bloodthirsty puppet.