Recently unearthed Fallout: New Vegas builds could be “incredibly useful” for modders, preservationists claim

Pre-release builds of Fallout: New Vegas recently unearthed at a shop in Utah contain rare files which could be “incredibly useful” to expanding what modders can do with the RPG. Well, at least they doe in the estimation of the folks who claim to have found them, a group of preservationists whose current online presence only looks to have popped up last month.

According to the group, who go by Games’ Past, they picked up these builds by buying some dev-kits which had been sitting around on a shelf for a year. They cite the betas contained in the kits as being from July 21st and August 22nd, 2010, with some bits of a build from April that year also having been found. For reference, New Vegas came out in October 2010.

The video mainly focuses on the July build, showing off a bunch of cut content it includes. Some of this stuff, like Mr House’s robo-girlfriend Marilyn, has previously been unearthed and restored by modders, but other bits don’t immediately come up if you search ‘cut content’ on New Vegas’ Nexus Mods page.

There’s an encounter with a wasteland adventurer who spoils the fun right after you leave Goodsprings by telling you in no uncertain terms that heading north through Quarry Junction’s a bad idea, a less annoyingly-voiced Oliver Swanick, and an early version of Mr House’s screen which makes him look a lot more like a Disco Elysium character. The video also flips between versions of the game, showing off some minor differences in how certain locations look.

Cool, but things get more interesting later in the video, when its narrator Ventura claims the builds could play a key role in helping expand what’s possible with current day New Vegas modding. “All three builds came with intact PDBs (program database files), which have never been leaked before for any version of Fallout New Vegas, or for any game before Fallout 4 for that matter,” they asserted. “For those who aren’t aware, the PDB file is an extremely important file to modders, as it is a file generated while the game is being built that contains much additional debugging information, which is incredibly useful for reverse engineering the game and understanding not only how the game functions, but the engine behind it as well.”

We’ll have to see if that comes to pass, but unless they’ve previously gone by a different name, this looks to be the first act of publicly visible preservation Games’ Past have done. Their YouTube channel only hosts this one video, while both it and their Twitter account were only created in October 2025. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it does make me a bit more hesitant to immediately trust their modding assertions than I would be if they were an established organisation with a visibly substantial track record for this kind of thing.

Perhaps, like the wastelander who’s keen not to see you become Deathclaw food, time’ll prove I’m just being a bit too cautious.