The Fallout Perk That Almost Kept the Game Off European Shelves

Fallout is having a big moment again thanks to the hit live-action series, but the franchise almost got kneecapped in Europe way back in the late 90s over one very loaded mechanic: the infamous Childkiller label. Yes, that was a thing. And yes, it almost got the games blocked from being sold across the region.

What actually happened

• Fallout (1997) and Fallout 2 (1998) let you roam a harsh wasteland full of adults, raiders, and, crucially, children. The series was built on systems that tracked how NPCs felt about you.
• If you killed a child in those early games, the consequences were brutal: your reputation and even your charisma took a permanent hit, your karma tanked, shops might refuse you, and some characters would attack you on sight. In Fallout 1, that showed up as a specific reputation known as Childkiller.
• That design choice helped push the games to an M-rating. But European markets went a step further and said they would not sell the game at all if children were in it.
• Interplay did not have time to rewrite quests and all the branching content, so for the European releases, they removed kids entirely to keep the games on shelves.
• For Fallout 2, the team even created a new perk-style icon tied to Childkiller, but it never shipped. The icon stayed on the cutting-room floor because, well, you can guess why.

Tim Cain explains the blowback

Producer Tim Cain laid out the thinking and the fallout (sorry) in an interview with GameSpot. The idea, in their heads, was to let players make choices and then live with the consequences. Europe was not on board.

"We said look, we're going to have kids in the game; you shoot them, it's a huge penalty to karma, you're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, people will shoot you on sight, and we thought people can decide what they want to do. This of course contributed to our M-rating, however, Europe said 'no.' They wouldn't even sell the game if there were children in the game."

So Interplay pulled kids from the European versions as a fast fix, avoiding a de facto ban without overhauling half the game.

How fans feel about it now

Time has turned a once-controversial mechanic into a strange bit of franchise lore. Fans tend to look back at the whole Childkiller situation as an odd design relic, and some even celebrate it as a piece of Fallout history. Case in point: a user on r/Fallout, u/DopeyDreadhead, shared a photo of his wife's tattoo of the unused Fallout 2 Childkiller icon. That is commitment to a deep cut.

The road not taken

If Interplay had dug in and kept kids in the European releases, the series might have been stuck in regulatory limbo right when it was trying to get off the ground. Instead, Fallout kept moving. Bethesda later developed Fallout 3 under a license in the mid-2000s and then bought the IP outright in 2007. Todd Howard has been steering the franchise since 2004, and the brand has only gotten bigger from there. Now there is a live-action adaptation that turned into a genuine hit.

So yeah, the wasteland almost got shut out of an entire continent over one brutal reputation flag. It is a weird little footnote that says a lot about how messy game design, ratings, and regional rules can get — and how a small tweak can keep a series alive long enough to become, well, Fallout.