Vault Boy is the mascot of the Fallout media franchise. Created by staff at Interplay Entertainment, the original owners of the Fallout intellectual property (IP), Vault Boy was introduced in 1997's Fallout as an advertising character representing Vault-Tec, a fictional megacorporation that built a series of specialized fallout shelters throughout the United States prior to the nuclear holocaust that sets up the world state of the Fallout universe. Within the video game series, Vault Boy serves as a generic representation of the player character's statistical information within user interface (UI) menus, and is a recurring element in Vault-Tec products found throughout the fictional Fallout universe.