A brand new YouTube channel called Games’ Past dedicated to unearthing prototypes and canceled videogames has kicked things off with a humdinger of a find. It’s a pre-release build of Fallout: New Vegas from a month before it went on sale, one that’s two gigabytes larger than the final version and jammed full of things that were ultimately cut or altered from the New Vegas that arrived on shelves in 2010.
This build, and a release build with debug features enabled as well as another drive with the DLC, were found on a pair of Xbox 360 dev kits in a second-hand store where they’d been sitting for a year. Some of the stuff that’s been unearthed was already discovered in the PC version, but is present here in expanded form. For instance, it’s long been known that Mr. House originally had a second securitron girlfriend named Marilyn—she’s on one of the playing cards that came with the collector’s edition, and there’s a mod to restore her along with the single voice line left in the release version. But load up this build and you can have a whole conversation with Marilyn.
There’s also an early version of Mr. House, with a face that looks a lot more Steve Buscemi than the suave character we know. He’s got a bunch of cut dialogue too, presumably stuff you could trigger by playing a woman with a high Charisma, in which he pays the Courier to scan her body. The saucy devil.
There’s plenty more to find, and the original video highlights an NPC called the Wasteland Adventurer who offers some advice and warns you about deathclaws when you leave the starter town of Goodspring, a very different-sounding voice for lottery winner Oliver Swanick, as well as a whole heap of locations with altered looks and bright green radioactive tumbleweeds blowing past.
The recovered files include PDBs, which modders have never had access to before, containing debug information that’s invaluable in reverse-engineering efforts. The months ahead are going to be an exciting time for the New Vegas modding community.
