It took Bethesda "several months" to get Fallout 3's Liberty Prime to do what he's told and stop fighting random NPCs: "It's all we're asking you to do, sir"

The mighty Liberty Prime stomps through both Fallout 3 and 4 at particular intervals, causing absolute chaos, as giant robots tend to do. In a delightfully meta twist, it turns out the devs at Bethesda had just as much trouble wrangling the four-limbed weapon as anyone in the post-apocalyptic RPGs.

"We spent months trying to get him to walk this very specific path. Months…" Angela Browder, associate producer on Fallout 3, now studio director at Bethesda, tells PCGamer. "'It's all we're asking you to do, sir.' You'll get Liberty Prime really close, and then some random NPC will run in his way, and then next thing you know Liberty Prime is over here shooting."

When you first meet the oversized T-800, it's dormant, because the US military couldn't find anything strong enough to power it. The Brotherhood of Steel decided to solve this issue, believing this thing could be the weapon they need to defeat the Enclave. The hulking mass of metal does help, though making it function properly was a Sisyphean task.

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"I spent several months rewriting portions of the pathfinding system to accommodate him and all the havoc he wreaked," Jean Simonet, an AI and system programmer on Fallout 3, adds.

Him attracting bedlam is fine for large portions of his gameplay, but a climactic part of 3 requires him to be front and centre. When you have something as unruly as Liberty Prime on the move, the path of least resistance is to just make space as needed and try to limit the distractions.

Watching it as a bystander and then fighting alongside the metal ally are both highlights of the third and fourth mainline Fallout games. It's the kind of wish fulfillment you boot up the game for: wacky sci-fi carnage wherein you get to run into battle with the Iron Giant by your side.

It almost warms your heart, until you remember just how stressful it all was to put together. But that's the cost of war, right?

Fallout lead says "spaghetti code" has nothing to do with being a "stupid, lazy programmer" – it happens when developers aren't given enough time: "I'd love to tell you this was hypothetical. It's not."