Mister Handy utility robots were first released back in the halcyon days of 2039. A joint venture between RobCo and General Atomics International, the hovering, buzzsaw-weilding, nuclear-powered butlerbots were an immediate success. Despite early hardware issues (fixed in a second-run hardware revision in 2039), Mister Handy became a staple of upper-middle-class American life during in the years before the Great War and nuclear holocaust of 2077.
Of course,Mister Handy doesn't exist outside of the fictional universe of Fallout. But Istvan Pely and Dennis Mejillones—lead artist for Fallout 4 and the designer of Mister Handy,respectively—want playersto feel like it could. When youroll up on a floating squid-like robot that has a posh British accent and identifies as "Codsworth" at the beginning of Fallout 4,they want that robot to feel realistic. It's harder than it might sound.
"If this was built in the real world, how it would it work?"
"One of the most important aspects of it was functional," Mejillones tells PM. "If this was built in the real world, how it would it work?" It's a question answered in part by the Falloutcanon, aspreviousgamesestablished key designspecifics. A Mister Handy hovers with a jet engine powered by a miniature nuclear reactor. A Mister Handy can tell jokes, but its "humor emitter array" has to recharge between uses. A Mister Handy has a trio of creepy articulating eye-pods atop stalks, and generally resembles a mechatronic octopus.
But forFallout 4, out November 10—the series' first outing in seven years, and itsdebut on the newest generation of game consoles—there's more room for detail, andmore need for it. In working out the specifics of a fake sci-fi robot, you'llfacesome of the same challenges you might come up againstwhile building an actual robot.
For one, there's the structural design. It's easy to handwave the really outlandish stuff like nuclear batteries and near-silent hover engines,but the smaller details that resemble the look ofthe robots we actually have todaycan make the illusion come together or fall apart. While 3D-printing models of the bot to see how it all fit together, Mejillones discovered a fatal flaw. "There's a shoulder joint at the very top of one of his octopus arms, and it just wasn't structurally strong enough to hold, even in the 3D-printed model," he says. "I had to rework how that joint works to increase its durability."
You also don't just an emotionless hunk of metal. A companion robot needs toskewmore ASIMO than ATLAS."We wanted this guy to feel like a companion, almost like a dog in some ways," Mejillones tells me. But it's hard to express feelingswithout a mouth or eyes. What Mister Handy does have are lenses on his cameras, and simply by adding some lines along the apertures, Mejillones exaggerated their twists and turns to give this wildly alien robot a means to emote. "He can play out more emotions just because of a tick mark on either side of the lens. "
Mister Handy's guts are meticulously designed as well. We may not actuallyhaveminiature nuclear batteries in modern robots, but you can bet they designeda spot for one buried inside the digital 3Dmodel of a Mister Handy's innards. "I probably put in a hundred components. Quite a lot of parts in there," Mejillones says.
You'll see those partsshould a hapless Mister Handy wind up on the wrong end of a sledgehammer-wielding super mutant, or your rocket launcher. Mister Handy is designed to be destroyed in brutal slow-motion combat. "When you see this guy on the floor all ripped apart, it's really informing you on how these things are made," Mejillones tells me. "It's the kind of thing you don't really pick up on until you see him in pieces on the floor and you're like 'Oh my god. This thing has been constructed at a factory.'"
"You're like 'Oh my god. This thing has been constructed at a factory.'"
Could you build a real Mister Handy if youreally wanted to? How would it stack up? The answer: You can, sort of. And not too bad, actually.
This giant fiberglass and plastic replica is the closest thing we've got.Built by Advanced Animations—which also builtTerminator robots you can find at Universal Studios—this Mister Handy stands nearly six feet tall and has been traveling from trade shows to press events, doing promotional work for Fallout 4 since the his (and the game's)reveal at this summer's E3. "He floats, his arms move, his eyes move. He has a floating motion and some lighting effects," Peter Stiebris, project lead forMister Handytold me. "There's a dimmer on board for the thruster, there's a lot of good things about him."
Of course, this fiberglass, plastic, andmetal model can't hold a candle to the real thing. The hover action relies on lighting and a stand that moves up and down. Instead of floating freely, this Mister Handy isaffixed to the wall and instead of nuclear power,he gets his juiceby way of a connection into the boring old power grid. That said, he's at least gotthe jokes down.
But accomplishing even that much was tough. If you're building a giant robot from the ground up, form can follow function. Bringing a fictional robot into the real world without changing its appearance is a whole other sort of challenge. Especially when that robot's from the future.
''We had to try to figure how how to feed and support everything through the actual 3D model that we had," Stiebris says. "It's not like we could build something and then try to fit the covering over it to make it look like a robot. If we had that luxury, that'd be great but we never build a robot just to build a robot. We always have a robot and then everything has to fit inside."
If you could manage a fully-functional Mister Handy, complete with hover engine, buzzsaw, flamethrower, and wry sense of humor,Mejillones and Pely would be first in line to buy one. "I wouldn't hesitate," says Pely, thinking back to when those robot dog toys were big. "Theydidn't even do anything butthe idea of an autonomous creature walking around the house was a thrill."
"I would absolutely get one. Iwould love to build one at home someday," says Mejillones, who already tinkers with robotics in his spare time. "Iwould totally let it watch my daughter. "
Yeahwe've got our smartphones, and ourlaptop computers.Our Roombas and ourinternet.But for nowthere's still a floatingoctopus-shaped hole in our timeline. Although if we can manageto dodge the nuclear apocalypse, maybe it's worth the effort to just clean up after ourselves.
Fallout 4 will be available for Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC on November 10.
