A pre-release build of Fallout: New Vegas recently found in a shop in Utah contains rare files that could be “incredibly useful” for expanding what modders can do with the RPG. Well, at least they do in the estimation of those who claim to have found them, a group of conservationists whose current online presence emerged only last month.
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According to the group that runs Games Past, they picked up these builds by purchasing some dev-kits that had been sitting on the shelf for a year. They date the betas in the kit to July 21 and August 22, 2010, with some fragments also found from an April build of that year. For context, New Vegas came out in October 2010.
The video primarily focuses on the July build, showing off a bunch of cut content included in it. Some of this stuff, like Mister House’s robo-girlfriend Marilyn, has been discovered and restored by modders before, but other things don’t immediately come up if you search ‘cut content’ on New Vegas’ Nexus mods page.
It features an encounter with a wasteland adventurer who spoils the fun right after you leave Goodsprings and tells you in no uncertain terms that going north through Quarry Junction is a bad idea, a less annoying-voiced Oliver Swanick, and an early version of Mr. House’s screen that makes him look like a Disco Elysium character. The video also flips between versions of the game, showing some minor differences in the appearance of certain locations.
Nice, but things get more interesting later in the video, when its narrator Ventura claims that the build could play a key role in helping expand what’s possible with current New Vegas modding. They claimed, “All three builds came with intact PDBs (program database files), which had never been leaked before for any version of Fallout New Vegas or for any game prior to Fallout 4.” “For those who aren’t aware, the PDB file is an extremely important file for modders, as it’s a file generated during the build of the game that contains a lot of additional debugging information, which is incredibly useful for reverse engineering the game and understanding not only how the game works, but also the engine behind it.”
We’ll have to see if that happens, but unless they’ve gone by a different name before, this appears to be the first publicly visible act of preservation that Games Past has done. His YouTube channel only hosts this one video, while both it and his Twitter account were created in October 2025. It doesn’t make sense, but it makes me a little more hesitant to immediately trust their revised claims than I would have if they were an established organization with an apparently substantial track record for this sort of thing.
Perhaps, like the Wasteland man who doesn’t want to see you become Deathclaw’s food, time will prove that I was a little too cautious.
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