Type of site Fan site/Wiki Website fallout.gamepedia.com Registration Optional | Owner Curse, Inc. Commercial Yes | |
Created by Paweł "Ausir" Dembowski | ||
The Vault is a wiki about the Fallout fictional universe. It covers all of the Fallout video games, as well as all Fallout related content. The Vault runs on MediaWiki and is currently part of the Curse network. The site is also available in several other languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
History and description
The Vault was founded by Paweł Dembowski and launched on February 7, 2005, initially hosted by Fallout fansite Duck and Cover, as a general source of information about the Fallout universe, initially focusing mostly on information about the Fallout world, as depicted in Fallout and Fallout 2. Its purpose was to continue the work started by Fallout 2 developer Chris Avellone in his Fallout Bible, which was meant to be a reference guide to the Fallout fictional universe, but was abandoned after Avellone left Black Isle Studios. Since the launch, the wiki has expanded to include the entire Fallout series, both in terms of the fictional universe and in terms of gameplay information and help.
In 2007, because the original host could no longer take the wiki constantly being targeted for various exploits by spammers as well as other attackers, the Vault moved to Wikia, and became one of Wikia's most popular wikis after the release of Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks in October 2008. It has broken previous popularity records for gaming wikis on the weekend after the release of Fallout: New Vegas in October 2010, with daily page views topping at 8.8 million (the previous record, 5 million, belonged to WoWWiki). Within the first week of the game's release, the site had 2.5 million unique visitors.
In October 2011, The Vault was split by its founder and many of the administrators moved to FalloutWiki.com, and later fallout.gamepedia.com, both hosted by Curse. The wikia version remains, now under the name "Nukapedia".
In an interview with Eurogamer, the wiki's founder has stated that it has even been used as a source by developers of recent Fallout games, citing one example of lore in Fallout 3 being influenced by The Vault.
The Vault has also released some previously unknown information on canceled Fallout projects like the Fallout Extreme 2000 console game and the 1998 cancelled Fallout film project. As well as using its YouTube channel and other social media to make available audio and video Fallout Media.