The power armor in the Fallout series was made without Bethesda's interference, but the company insisted on a working Pip-Boy

Aside from a few additional functions, the power armor from the Fallout series extremely accurately imitates its prototype from the games. However, it could have had a completely different look — according to production designer Howard Cummings, Bethesda never insisted on an exact resemblance to the games.

“They didn't say, ‘You have to play the game.’ They never said that. They said, ‘Show us how you think it should be.’”

Cummings didn't know much about the Fallout games when he started working on the series, but after reading the script and studying the series, he simply liked it and the team decided to recreate everything as accurately as possible.

“It was very early on, Bethesda didn't know what we were doing, so they didn't share assets with me. When they later showed Todd Howard and other producers what we were working on, the response was, ‘Oh, you're making a game.’”

Working with Bethesda was the opposite of his production experience, where the owner of the source material insisted on approving every detail. “I started approaching them, not the other way around,” says Cummings, who knew that game fans would be very nit-picky.

The power armor was initially modeled by concept artist Thang Le, and the designs were sent to a company called Legacy Effects, which produced many famous screen armor sets, including Iron Man costumes for Marvel movies.

Howard Cummings also explained the changes in the use and structure of the Pip-Boy, a device that characters in the games and the Fallout series wear on their arms. According to him, it was necessary to reduce the size of these devices compared to how large they are in the games.

“So, I talked to Todd Howard about it, I said, ‘You know we're shrinking the Pip-Boy?’ And he said, ‘The Pip-Boy is big in the game because you have to play with its screen. The Pip-Boy needs to be smaller.’ And then we had Ella Purnell, a delicate girl with tiny wrists.”

Bethesda wanted the Pip-Boy to actually work. So, the decorators attached a phone to it.