A YouTube channel unearths a New Vegas prototype that is a whopping 2GB larger than the final release build.
Shortly before the release of season 2 of the Amazon series, many fans are reminiscing about Fallout: New Vegas. That’s because the sequel to the hit series takes us to the iconic New Vegas Strip, the setting for Fallout’s role-playing highlight.
If you can’t get enough of Fallout: New Vegas, we have good news for you: A lost version of the game has surfaced that is a full 2 GB larger than the final release version. We’ll briefly explain what happened and what you’ll find in the files.
Fallout: New Vegas was even bigger
What happened? The brand-new YouTube channel Games’ Past is dedicated to excavating and restoring old games. It starts with an old version of Fallout: New Vegas, dated July 21, 2010 – just one month before the final build was created. This prototype is 6 GB in size, which is a full 2 GB more than the final version.
But how did the YouTuber get hold of the prototype in the first place? In October 2025, he bought three Xbox 360 Dev Kit consoles from a second-hand store – special versions of consoles that are issued to game developers for testing, developing, and optimizing games. They contain debugging tools, often have more RAM, and are generally equipped with different hardware and software to facilitate the entire development process.
One of the Dev Kit consoles belonged to Atlus USA, the other two came from Obsidian Entertainment.
What was on the consoles?
On the first console, the YouTubers found the aforementioned version from July 21, 2010, and a later version from August 22, 2010. The latter is identical to the final build and thus the release version, except that the debugging settings are still active, which are normally disabled on consoles.
The earlier build contains many differences from Fallout: New Vegas as we know it today. Many textures, lighting, character models, and dialogues have been changed again and generally take up more space in the earlier version. Deleted features such as locations and NPCs can also be seen. In some cases, deleted or temporary audio files can still be heard.
Games’ Past shows a few examples in the video. At 05:31, you can hear a dialogue with lottery winner Oliver Swanick that is slightly different from what we know. At 04:01, you can see what Mr. House used to look like – and at 03:55, you can see confirmation of something that has already been unearthed elsewhere: Mr. House had a second Securiton girlfriend named Marilyn in his Lucky 38 penthouse.
New opportunities for the modding community
Probably the most exciting discovery on the console are the so-called PDB files from Fallout: New Vegas, which have not appeared anywhere else yet. These are program database files that contain debugging information, among other things.
This is fantastic news, especially for modders, as it allows them to track a wide variety of features and understand how they were built into the engine. This could open the door to new mods that we haven’t seen before for Fallout: New Vegas.
On the second console, the team behind Games’ Past found versions of all four DLCs for Fallout: New Vegas, dated February 15, 2011, a full seven months before the release of Lonesome Road. Here, too, there are many changes and cut content – so it’s worth keeping an eye out for a new video!
