“One of the most important aspects of it was functional. So Mejillones turned to rapid prototyping to check his design, and after 3D printing all of the robot’s parts to see how they would function a glaring design flaw became apparent. Considering how advanced robotics have become, if Mister Handy’s arms didn’t work the way real robotic arms work then it would be immediately noticed. The importance of the robot’s structural design can’t be downplayed Mister Handy needed to be able to look as if he would really function or the illusion of realism would vanish. It turns out that designing a virtual robot is a lot like designing an actual robot, and that they face many of the same design challenges. And because game consoles are becoming so advanced, and the designers of Fallout 4 had room to include much more detail than in previous games, it became essential to make Mister Handy (named for all of his hands) as functional a robot as they could manage. Typically sci-fi video games don’t need to explain how their technology would work in real life, but let’s be real, nerds really like it when they do. The previous games had already set up some of the robo-butlers technology, like the silent, nuclear powered jet engine that allows him to hover in place, the multiple arms with a wide variety of tool attachments and of course the “humor emitter array” that has to be recharged between clever bon mots. That included redesigning the character from the bottom up, and creating a robot that could almost function in the real world.įor Fallout 4 lead artist Istvan Pely and Mister Handy designer Dennis Mejillones making a Mister Handy robot named Codsworth, one of the first things that the game player sees, feel realistic was important to them for several reasons.

But when the designers of Fallout 4, the first Fallout game designed for the current generation of gaming consoles, got around to revamping him, they wanted to make him to feel real.

He’d previously been seen floating around, dishing out British-accented sarcasm and employing his buzz saw arm in Fallout 3. Mister Handy, the floating, nuclear multi-armed robotic butler, isn’t a new character in the Fallout universe by any means. The development of a video game is probably the last place that you would think to find rapid prototyping being used, but it turns out 3D printing played a key role in helping the game designers from Fallout 4 feel as real as possible.

Fallout 4 mr handy model