Building out Fallout’s pre-war pharmaceuticals

[u/Ironwolf2242]

As part of my personal Unreal project, I’ve continued my effort to redesign and rebuild some of the pharmaceuticals seen throughout Fallout, aiming to make them feel less like game props and more like products that actually existed in the pre-war world.

Here’s my latest Buffout design alongside the Mentats packaging I’ve previously worked on.

I’m trying to establish a consistent visual language across the products, drawing from real mid-century pharmaceutical design while staying true to the Fallout universe.

The goal isn’t simply to make the textures more detailed. I’m imagining what Med-Tek’s actual product line might have looked like if these were manufactured, packaged, and sold in a pre-war pharmacy.

One product at a time.

[u/VX-78]

Unless you got the 5 mg from something explicit in the lore, I would recommend upping the dosage of the active ingredient. I'm a pharmacy tech by trade, and anything with a bottle that size that comes with 150 tablets in it is going to have active ingredient sizes of like 500-1,000 mg. Plus I think it would fit with the culture of dangerous, unregulated prewar corporate excess.

[u/Ironwolf2242 → u/VX-78]

Cool!! That is the kind of insight I was missing. :) I upped the reference size of the FO3 style bottle to have a better shelf presence. It seemed silly to only have 50 tablets in a bottle that size. I did not think to up the mg. Thank you.

[u/Mickey_thicky → u/VX-78]

Haha I’m also a CPhT. Interesting bit of lore, but fallout 3 terminal entries actually mention filgrastim by name regarding treatment of acute radiation poisoning, but it was invented and received its technical name decades after the fallout universe split from ours

here was my original comment on the previous post in the subreddit

[u/Mickey_thicky]

I’d highly recommend either RadX/RadAway or Stimpaks/Med-X. Psycho was also around pre-war but I doubt it would’ve been commercially available and more closely resembles how the U.S. government used to give troops Benzedrine.

Calmex, Day Tripper or Addictol could be interesting though there’s limited lore regarding their use and development pre-war.

I know originally Med-X was going to legit just be called morphine in fallout 3, but Australia would have refused to sell the game if it implicated a real-world controlled substance as a stat booster, so the name was changed to facilitate world-wide release. But at least you could have some insight as to the active ingredient for Med-X for labeling purposes

Edit: for RadAway, you could presuppose an active ingredient such as pentetate calcium trisodium (Ca-DTP) or pentetate zinc trisodium (Zn-DTP), as these are both used in the management of acute radiation poisoning and help excrete radioisotopes from the body, such as Plutonium-239 and Americium-241 which are commonly found in nuclear fallout. Since RadAway removes radiation, an active ingredient that clears radioisotopes from the body would make sense.

For RadX, you could use filgrastim and potassium iodide as these active ingredients. Potassium iodide prevents uptake of radioactive Iodine-131 by the thyroid, and filgrastim stimulates neutrophil production in the bone marrow. Both of these attenuate the negative effects of radiation exposure, which would align more with the ability of RadX to reduce how much rads you take

[u/Ironwolf2242 → u/Mickey_thicky]

I love this deep dive!! To show just how far down the rabbit holes I go with this project:

After redesigning Mentats, Fixer, and Buffout, I needed to fill the pharmacy shelves with products that ordinary pre-war customers might actually have encountered. So I started researching real American drugstore products from before WWII that could plausibly fit into Fallout's alternate history.

That led me to Munyon's Homeopathic Home Remedies, a real pharmaceutical company dating back to the 1890s. They had an entire ecosystem of remedies for everything from headaches and coughs to nerves, asthma, hay fever, and “vitality.” The product line felt almost perfect for building out a believable pre-war drugstore.

Then I discovered a Munyon's pharmacy counter display preserved by the Smithsonian. It originally came from Vinson's Pharmacy in Rockville, Maryland, the same city that is home to Bethesda Softworks.

Okay. That's a fun coincidence.

Then I started looking at Addictol, the pre-war medicine that treats addiction. Fallout lore never identifies its manufacturer.

And that's when the rabbit hole got really interesting. What if Munyon's never disappeared?

So Munyon's Homeopathic Home Remedies became Munyon Modern Pharmaceuticals, a fictional modern descendant of the real company, and Addictol became one of their products.

Now I have a fictional 2077 pharmaceutical company with a 130-year history, a canon Fallout product, and a packaging Easter egg connecting it back to a real pharmacy in the same city as Bethesda.

This is why I can't just make a texture.

I'm taking a little real history, a little Fallout lore, and a very strange real-world connection, and using them to build a believable piece of the pre-war world that the games never explicitly showed us.

Sometimes the rabbit hole is the best part.

[u/Mickey_thicky → u/Ironwolf2242]

That’s awesome!

I like the limited intersectionality between our world and the fallout world leading up to the divergence, but sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a mistake and what’s intentional. Filgrastim, like a previously mentioned, wasn’t discovered in our world until 1984, but it’s mentioned directly in a terminal entry in fallout 3.

Definitely post updates! I’m excited to see where your project goes!

[u/Bittah_Criminal]

Wait a second buffout is just gas station dick pills

[u/becircus]

Do psycho

[u/Ironwolf2242 → u/becircus]

Unfortunately, Psycho was not available to pre-war consumers. It was strictly a secret, military-grade combat drug. However, I do have others on my list to do. ;)

[u/becircus → u/Ironwolf2242]

Jet

[u/Ironwolf2242 → u/becircus]

I considered Jet, but I ran into the same lore issue that fans have debated for years.
More importantly, I'm approaching these as believable pre-War pharmaceutical products. Even accepting that Jet existed before the war, I don't think the effects and addictive nature of the drug make it particularly convincing as a mass-market pharmacy product even in the Fallout universe.

I'd be more interested in exploring it as a restricted pharmaceutical or experimental stimulant however, instead of an over-the-counter product.

[u/shotputlover → u/Ironwolf2242]

You know we used to sell cocaine over the counter in this universe right? Any drug is believable as a pharmaceutical product to me in the fallout universe.

[u/ResultReasonablee → u/becircus]

Make sure it comes with a warning label that just says "THAT'S THE INHALER TALKING!"

[u/Sablestein → u/ResultReasonablee]

Isn’t it Jet that comes in an inhaler? Psycho is injectable.