According to the Fallout series, war never changes, and neither do some of the game's more iconic color combinations. Blue and yellow have been a prevalent color combination since the first game's release back in 1997, but few have known the reasons behind it. Now, courtesy of a new interview with two of the original Fallout team members, the reasoning is clear.

Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who are currently the co-directors on the upcoming Outer Worlds with Obsidian Entertainment, primarily talked about the upcoming sci-fi action RPG during an interview with Game Informer. However, they did also spend a little time discussing the original entries to the Fallout series. According to Tim Cain, the shades of blue and yellow known so well today might have never been used at all had things gone just a little differently.

Back in the day when the first Fallout was being developed, Tim Cain was the lead programmer, and was responsible for providing the color palette that the developers had to choose from when creating game assets. At the time, the game wasn't making use of the blue and yellow colors within said palette. Cain left the development team with a choice: use the blue and yellow colors somewhere within Fallout, or they would be deleted from the game entirely.

Fallout 76 jacket back

As anyone familiar with the Fallout series can likely guess, the team chose to use the colors rather than have them removed. Since then, the blue and yellow color combination has remained still strongly prevalent in Fallout games, gracing some of the most iconic imagery from the series, such as the various vault dwellers' suits suits and the propaganda parody Vault Boy. The color combo was also carried on to new creations once Fallout migrated to developer Bethesda, as with Nuka Cola Quantum, and continues to be used both within the game series and on its merchandise.

If the decision had gone the other way, Fallout as a series might look quite different than it does today, if only because of a stark difference in the appearance of vault suits. That simple decision will likely continue to affect Fallout games going forward, as the blue and yellow color combination is likely here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Source: Game Informer