Fallout just pulled a deep cut from the New Vegas vault of what-ifs and made it matter. After 15 years of teasing, Vault 24 is finally real in Fallout Season 2, and it is not just a wink at fans. It is a full-on plot engine with some grim worldbuilding to match.
From scrapped New Vegas idea to TV canon
Back in 2010, Fallout: New Vegas hinted at Vault 24 but never actually put it in the game. It was cut before release. Players never found a location, a terminal, a stray holotape—nothing. The only trace was a Vault 24 jumpsuit buried in the files, only accessible if you spawned it with console commands. That was it.
Behind the scenes, the plan had been to stick the vault somewhere in the Mojave Wasteland near a drive-in theater, which fits the Cold War paranoia vibe a lot of New Vegas experiments leaned into. Fans spent years guessing why it got dropped: maybe there was not enough time, maybe the concept was a little too on-the-nose even for Fallout. No official answer ever came, so it became one of the game’s more famous loose ends.
As of December 17, 2025, the show locks it down. Vault 24 is canon now.
'Vault 24 was cut from Fallout: New Vegas so the show was free to make it whatever they wanted to fit their story! The only asset Obsidian finished was the Vault 24 suit that was only obtainable via console commands.'
What the show actually reveals
Season 2 is set in 2296, fifteen years after New Vegas. In the premiere, Lucy MacLean and The Ghoul track a bloody breadcrumb trail left by Lucy’s dad, Hank MacLean, and end up at a sealed door labeled Vault 24. Inside, the place does not look like the tidy, retro-future vaults we are used to. It is rusted, overgrown, empty, and wrong.
Deeper in, they find skeletons in faux-Soviet uniforms, each one buckled into a chair and locked in front of propaganda reels. It is a nasty image with an even nastier twist: those people were not foreign infiltrators. They were Americans. Vault-Tec had wired them into experimental brain-computer rigs and tried to overwrite their beliefs—turning citizens into loyal communist agents through propaganda loops and neural conditioning.
- When: Season 2 Episode 1, set in 2296 (15 years post-New Vegas)
- Who: Lucy MacLean and The Ghoul, following Hank MacLean’s bloody trail
- Where: Vault 24, formerly a cut New Vegas location once intended near a Mojave drive-in
- What the experiment was: A brainwashing facility using brain-computer interfaces to reprogram Americans into communist operatives via propaganda and neural conditioning
- How it connects: The vault’s tech is the same mind-control chip Robert House demonstrates earlier in the season
- Why Hank was there: He did not stumble in—he came to recover the research
- Why fans care: Before this, Vault 24 only existed as a cut asset—literally just a jumpsuit you could spawn via console commands
So what does this change?
This is more than fan service. By tying Vault 24’s neural reprogramming to the mind-control chip Robert House shows off earlier, the series folds ancient Vault-Tec cruelty straight into the season’s main conflict. It reframes Hank’s mission, too—he is not chasing ghosts; he is hunting a blueprint for controlling people at scale.
And in classic Fallout fashion, the horror is mundane: rows of chairs, loops of propaganda, and a corporation that decided the fastest way to win hearts and minds was to crack open the mind part. Bleak even by wasteland standards.
The loose end is tied, finally
For years, Vaults 11 and 21 got all the attention in New Vegas while Vault 24 was a rumor with a filename. Season 2 finally drags it out into daylight, confirms what it was, and makes it matter to the story. Mystery solved, and in a way that actually moves the plot.
Fallout Season 2 is streaming exclusively on Prime Video.