For 20 years, the Fallout franchise has energized legions of fans with its bleak landscapes and horror-western aesthetic. But there are still plenty of dark secrets that even Fallout’s biggest fans don’t know about the series, and there’s no better time than now to revisit what it is that makes the grim role-playing game so compelling.

Sep. 30, 2017, marks the 20th anniversary of Fallout, which first appeared on store shelves as a PC-exclusive title in 1997. Back then, the games were developed and published by Interplay Entertainment. After Bethesda Softworks acquired the IP in 2007, the studio contracted with Interplay to create a Fallout MMORPG, which never materialized. The resulting lawsuit saw all rights to Fallout revert to Bethesda in 2012. The Elder Scrolls publisher has now released more games in the franchise than Interplay, but that hasn’t stopped some fans from feeling as if the console developer ruined the franchise.

The contention between fans of Fallout’s two eras is no secret, but some of the minor details from the series’ hundreds of quests and locations are. Interplay’s and Bethesda’s survival games are at their most frightening when no one is looking. Many of the items on the list below have been pulled from the corners and shadows of their respective games. They might take place during major, plot-related events, but these dark facts aren’t the focal points of those missions. The easy-to-miss moments are the ones that really flesh out the Wasteland and make the series all the more worthwhile.

25 You Can Play God ... With Ants

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In Fallout 3, players meet a little boy named Bryan Wilks, whose father has been trapped inside the town of Grayditch, which is overrun with fire-breathing ants. Now, you might ask, just whose idea was it to create the fire ants? Answer: no one. The fire ants were the result of a well-meaning experiment by a scientist who wanted to shrink the Wasteland’s irradiated ants back to their normal size using the FEV mutagen. The Lone Wanderer may decide whether and how to allow the new species to live. Although you won’t become the new Fire Ant King or Queen in the process, it’s kind of disturbing to have the power to eradicate an entire species, even if they are spawned from the depths of Hades itself.

24 You're A Mass Murderer

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Fallout 3 also gave players the opportunity to don a serial killer’s identity in the Tranquility Lane simulation, but playing as the Pint-Sized Slasher wasn’t the only in-game feature to turn the Lone Wanderer into a mass-murderer. In fact, every Fallout hero crafts a career out of killing any and every potentially hostile creature in the Wasteland.

The one fact that no Fallout player wants to face is that every Raider, Supermutant, and Ghoul has a family to go home to at night — or not, considering that the gamer’s sole purpose is to annihilate them with extreme prejudice. That’s not an exaggeration: Fallout rewards you for killing people, even if they haven’t attacked you first.

So, yeah, you’re kind of a mass-murderer, no matter how good your Karma is.

23 You Can Make The First Final Boss Kill Himself

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Once an exiled Vault resident, the Master had transformed himself into an interconnected mass of computers and FEV-mutated humans before he became the final boss of the original Fallout game. His appearance remains one of the most terrific moments of body-horror the franchise has ever produced, but the Master had something else to set him apart, and it was just as disturbing. His plan is to rescue every human in the Wasteland from irradiation by forcing them to submit to Supermutant transformation, but the Vault Dweller can convince the Master to abandon his entire scheme if they reveal to him that Supermutants are sterile, thus proving that his plot would lead directly to the end of the human race. Ashamed and unable to reconcile his existence in the absence of his plan, the Master detonates an atomic weapon, killing himself and those around him.

22 There's A Whole Fallout Game You'll Never Get To Play

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It may surprise you to learn that Bethesda’s Fallout 3 wasn’t the only one to be made. Codenamed Van Buren, Black Isle Studios’ Fallout 3 looked a lot like the previous games in the franchise, but featured both real-time and turn-based combat, as well as a multiplayer option. Although some of the game’s concepts and characters eventually made their way to Fallout: New Vegas, and Bethesda released a tech demo for the title in 2007, Van Buren effectively died in 2003, when it was cancelled for financial reasons.

So wait, if Van Buren was playable, at least in some way, does that mean that there’s another Fallout game you’ll never get to play? Why, yes, Virginia, it does. Before Van Buren, Black Isle worked on another Fallout 3 project, the development of which “ultimately led to the creation of Icewind Dale,” according to IGN.

21 Dogmeat Almost Always Died, Originally

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Seeing Dogmeat in the Fallout 4 trailers delivered heart-fulls of anxiety to many animal-loving players, who worried about having to cope with the inevitable loss of their canine companion. You see, Dogmeat had also appeared in Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout 3, and in every one of those games, he could die, just like any other companion. And in those installments, it was incredibly difficult to keep the pooch alive for the duration of the game, which mean heartache for the gamers who lost out on the experience of completing the campaign alongside their Wasteland Wanderer’s best friend. Fallout 4 differed from previous installments in that the developers deemed all of its permanent companions essential, A.K.A. unkillable, but Dogmeat’s fate was the only one about which players were truly concerned.

20 You Can Find A Gruesome Reference To The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

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In Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the hero’s engagement of the Infinite Improbability Drive spawns two sentient beings, a whale and a bowl of petunias, into the atmosphere, where they are left behind to plummet to their certain demise on the surface of the planet below. Fallout 2 contains a grisly reference to this memorable scene, in the form of a special encounter known as the “crashed whale.” Here, players can obtain a pot of daisies — a reference to Adams’ aforementioned bowl of petunias — and may examine exactly what it looks like when you drop a sperm whale from an approximate height of 300 feet. Fallout 2 also contained references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Wizard of Oz, but the crashed whale is a better-kept secret.

19 It Used To Let You Play Doctor

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Once upon a time, it took more than a Stimpak and some Crispy Squirrel Bits to make a Fallout hero feel better. When Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was in development, its creators implemented a surgery mini-game that would have forced you “to cauterize your own wounds while watching your character scream in pain” in order to heal from some wounds, according to GamesRadar+. Ultimately, the feature was cut because it bogged down gameplay, but it is still pretty creepy to think that, for however brief a time, Bethesda wanted players to perform un-anesthetized surgical techniques on themselves in the field. Thankfully, Fallout 3’s surgical mini-game did not show up in Fallout: New Vegas, either, in spite of the fact that the Nevada-based follow-up featured a Hardcore Mode that would have played the perfect home to Bethesda’s medical machinations.

18 Nuka Cola Used To Be Addictive

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At one time, everyone’s favorite post-apocalyptic beverage was just as addictive as any other chem. Nuka Cola has not been an addictive substance — to the player — for several games now, beginning with the release of Bethesda’s Fallout 3, but that doesn’t mean the Wasteland soda is 100 percent safe to drink, either. The Lone Wanderer can’t become dependent to Nuka Cola in Fallout 3, but Nuka Cola Quantum is still an addictive substance. And certain non-player characters in both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 exhibit some dependent-tendencies when it comes to the soft drink, which may mean that Nuka Cola can be habit-forming for certain people, but that the player character is immune to its dangerous effects. Either way, knowing that Nuka Cola was once considered an addictive chem casts a whole new light on Interplay’s Fallout games.

17 None Of The Food May Be Trusted

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Wasteland explorers rely on food and drink to sustain them from place to place in the world, but very little of the food items in the Fallout franchise can be trusted. It’s not just that the food is irradiated, although that does sour the Dandy Boy Apples a bit. In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, however, players have a distinct ingredient to beware: Strange Meat. Though it’s never stated outright, Strange Meat is clearly human flesh, as it may be looted from the bodies and homes of cannibal NPCs. More disturbing than its mere presence, however, is the fact that consuming Strange Meat does not noticeably damage the player. Aside from a small amount of radiation and a negative Strength penalty, the Lone Wanderer and Courier experience nothing that would make them eschew that creepy source of protein.

16 There Are No Female Swampfolk Or Legionaries

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Like something out of The Hills Have Eyes, the Swampfolk of Fallout 3 are the product of decades of backwater inter-family relations in post-War Maryland. On the other side of the country, the militaristic Caesar’s Legion hold their own as an insular, territorial society in the southwest. There’s just one problem: Neither the Swampfolk nor the Legion have any female members. The Legionaries consider women to be subhuman, and the only women shown to have major connections to their organization are slaves. Likewise, the only women who associate with Swampfolk, so far as we are shown, are traders. So where do all the baby Swampfolk and Legionaries come from, then? It’s better if we just drop that line of questioning and move on to happier things.

15 The Children Of Freeside Might Be Starving, But They Sure Are Happy

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Located near the Strip in Fallout: New Vegas, Freeside is a slum that’s quite unlike even the poorest regions of the American Wasteland. Although the children appear to be quite happy, even in their dirty clothes and food-scarce days, killing a small animal near them reveals just how dire the situation in Freeside is. The children here are quite literally starving, to the extent that they’ll begin eating a recently killed creature raw. Of course, they’re polite little urchins, so they will thank the Courier for putting meat on the sidewalk-turned-dinner table. Frighteningly enough, the Freeside children’s affinity for raw rat pales in comparison to the fact that people turn up dead whenever the player isn’t looking, often after being chased through the New Vegas streets by local gang-members.

14 The Lottery Is An Inversion Shirley Jackson Would Love

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Ahh, Nipton. One of the most hellish places ever spawned in the Fallout franchise had to make the cut here. Found in Fallout: New Vegas’s Mojave Wasteland, Nipton is home to an ecstatic local who claims to have won the lottery, even as his hometown burns. As it turns out, Caesar’s Legion took over Nipton and implemented an inverted version of Shirley Jackson’s eponymous Lottery, one in which the winner is the survivor, rather than the sacrifice. Oliver Swanwick won first place, making him the only citizen that the Legion didn’t maim or kill. The runner up, Boxcars, was crippled. Two other Niptonites were enslaved by the Legion, and the rest of its citizens were crucified and burned for the mayor’s sin: double-crossing the Caesar.

13 The Fat Man Exists In Real Life

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One of the deadliest weapons in the Fallout franchise, the Fat Man has two real-world connections. The “nuclear catapult” shares its nickname with the bomb that the U.S. dropped over Nagasaki in 1945, but it looks like the Davy Crockett, a recoilless firing system designed to deliver the M-388 round during the Cold War. Given Fallout’s atompunk stylings, the decision to hearken back to real-world weapons of mass-destruction was probably an easy one for developers, but reconciling the fun of detonating an in-game warhead with the catastrophic destruction that weapon unleashed in real life is a bitter pill to swallow. If that weren’t bad enough, Fallout’s embracing of nuclear power as a boon, even in some small part, casts a chilling pall over the Fat Man’s dark legacy.

12 The Good Guys Are Horrifying

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In Fallout, the power armor-clad Brotherhood of Steel are the closest thing to a good guy that many players will see. They are the technologically-obsessed paladins of the Wasteland, devoted to preserving knowledge for the survival and advancement of the human race.

Or are they? You don’t have to dig far below the surface to find some seriously messed-up things the Brotherhood have done, from advocating for the extermination of all supposedly lesser races — the Supermutants, Synths, and Ghouls — to stealing technology from non-members. The Brotherhood’s obsession with preserving humanity clashes with their genocidal tendencies, as many of their highest-ranking members could be considered more machine than man.

In spite of this, Fallout puts players in league with the Brotherhood of Steel again and again, proving that moral boundaries aren’t very clear in the Wasteland.

11 Nuclear War Didn't Destroy Most Of The World

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When you think of Fallout, you probably imagine a shiny, 1950s-inspired world that went south with the drop of a bomb, right? Well, what if I told you that that’s not what happened in the world of Fallout at all? In fact, most of the destruction in Fallout came before the Great War. For 25 years up to that point, a collection of smaller conflicts known as the Resource Wars had broken out across the world, and they were mostly driven by a major fuel crisis. Then there was the New Plague, a bioweapon that was intended to sterilize communists, but wound up killing U.S. citizens instead, leading the government to register and quarantine the infected in Point Lookout, a move which led, in turn, to the inbred Swampfolk.

10 Lingering For Too Long In One House Will Crash The Game

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Both the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series have notorious glitches that can mar the gameplay experience, but it’s difficult to beat a buggy safe house on the inconvenience scale. Fallout 3’s first major city offers players a chance at the American dream of home-ownership with the My Megaton House. It’s creepy enough, being located a little too closely to an undetonated warhead and all, but what’s truly unnerving is the version of My Megaton House that didn’t make it into the official version of Fallout 3. Known simply as the Abandoned House, it’s an eerie, two-story nightmare, totally unskinned and cut off — quite literally — from the outside world. Just getting inside requires the player to use console commands available only on the PC version, and remaining within the Abandoned House for too long causes the game to crash. Almost as if you aren’t supposed to be there…

9 Players Were Once Able To Maim Child NPCs

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These days, it’s pretty much a given that, if there are any children present in a game, no matter its rating, the player cannot harm them directly. Even if bad things happen to juvenile characters over the course of the story, a hero cannot go around attacking and killing child NPCs as they like. Today, Fallout is no exception to this rule, but things used to be different. In the original Fallout and in Fallout 2, players could receive the Childkiller title for murdering underage NPCs. After Bethesda took over, though, children were classed as essential characters, which rendered them unkillable without changing the games’ code. As a result, so-called “killable children” mods for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 have been downloaded thousands of times, a revelation that is probably more disturbing than the fact that Fallout let you kill kids in the first place.

8 The Pre-War U.S. Is Horrific

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As I mentioned earlier, the U.S. had been running on a morally bankrupt engine for years prior to the day long Great War. As the last holder of fossil-fuel reserves, which it was unwilling to give up, the United States sparked a resource crisis that led to three decades of military conflict around the globe. It annexed both Canada and Mexico, where power-armored soldiers carried out extrajudicial executions on occupied soil. When a biological weapon intended to sterilize foreign enemies backfired, the U.S. wove the domestic catastrophe into its ongoing anti-socialist campaign. Meanwhile, the government knew that nuclear apocalypse was imminent, and developed its Vault system in response, but the Vaults were only ever intended to save people or a certain class. All in all, the pre-War U.S. was garbage.

7 You Can Make Mr. Handy Do Creepy Stuff

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Another homage to science-fiction literature, the Mr. Handy responsible for managing day-to-day activities in the Washington, D.C. Townhome of Fallout 3 carries on his duties, seemingly unaware that the members of his family are dead. He will attempt to walk the deceased dog, growing agitated when it will not stand up at his command, and will read a bedtime story — Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” — to the children’s corpses. The scene references Rad Bradbury’s 1950 short story, also called “There Will Come Soft Rains,” in which an automated household continues to function after a nuclear weapon annihilates its resident family. The household computer in Bradbury’s story also reads the Teasdale poem to the children, whose shadows are burned into the side of the home.

6 The Game Has Its Own Urban Legends

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Nothing good ever comes of a game’s foray into the real world. In Fallout 3, killing the Galaxy News Radio host Three Dog has the chance of turning GNR into a “numbers station” — a radio frequency that broadcasts strange strings of numbers — that revealed celebrity deaths and international tragedies years before they happened. Or so the story goes. In actuality, the GNR numbers station is a wild hoax perpetrated on the unsuspecting denizens of the Fallout subreddit, but its popularity led to a numbers-station mod for the game. And knowing that it was fake didn’t stop some creepypasta fans from wondering whether the Queen of England would die in 2014, or whether Britney Spears will someday win the Oscar that the hoaxer predicted. Although the numbers station wasn’t the only Fallout hoax to garner attention in recent years, it is by far the most infamous.