When I was a screenwriting student in college, I was taught that if we knew our characters well enough, they would speak to us. Maybe it was because I’d found her true name, but soon I was wondering “What would Vault Girl do?” when faced with decisions.

Vault Girl started to come alive for me shortly thereafter, in the same way a character might come alive for an author of fiction.

My character in Fallout 3 is named Aeryn, but after listening to Three Dog prattle on with these news reports for a while I began referring to my character as Vault Girl, and the appellation stuck. As our character travels the Wasteland, Three Dog breaks into the 1950’s-era music programming to tell the audience about the good (or evil) deeds of our character, who he refers to as “Vault 101.” named Three Dog in the middle of the ruined capital. There’s a station named “Galaxy News Radio” run by a D.J. Our character is equipped with a device called a Pip-Boy through which we manage our inventory items, read maps of the area and, among other things, listen to the radio. It’s a society that our character can choose to save, menace, or ignore. Our character finds a society clinging to existence in shantytowns, fighting against mutated monsters and scavenging for supplies. In Fallout 3, we play the role of a character raised in an underground nuclear survival shelter called a “Vault.” The overarching storyline involves following our father out of Vault 101 into the Capital Wasteland that surrounds the ruins of Washington, D.C., to discover why he left.

Vault girl pip boy