Fallout (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Fallout, the 1997 role-playing game from Interplay Productions, opens with a narrator voiced by the actor Ron Perlman. In 2026 he recalled that the job paid "40 dollars and a sandwich." It is a modest origin for a game that players and critics now rank among the finest ever made. Fallout sends one character out of an underground shelter with a single errand and a deadline. Everything after that is left to the player. What kind of world is waiting outside? How did the designers make decisions feel like they mattered? And why do developers still point back to this game today?

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• 2. A Clock on the Vault

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  On the 23rd of October 2077, a nuclear war between the United States and China brought modern civilization to an end. A global conflict over scarce resources had come first. Fallout opens in 2161, nearly a century later, beneath the mountains of Southern California. Vault 13 is one of many high-tech shelters built to protect survivors. A person born and raised inside it, known only as the Vault Dweller, is about to be sent out.

  The vault's water recycling and pumping machinery depends on a computer chip, and that chip has stopped working. Only 150 days of water remain. The Vault Overseer hands the Vault Dweller a PIPBoy 2000 and meager supplies, then points the hero toward Vault 15. Vault 15 turns out to be abandoned and in ruins. A replacement chip finally turns up in the destroyed Vault 12, which lies under the city of Necropolis. Designer Christopher Taylor added the deadline on purpose, to keep players pointed at the main quests instead of drifting.

  The wasteland holds far more than ruins. In Junktown, the sheriff Killian Darkwater, voiced by Richard Dean Anderson, struggles against a criminal named Gizmo, voiced by Jim Cummings. The Hub is a busy merchant city where work is easy to find. Necropolis was founded in the remains of Bakersfield by ghouls, humans heavily mutated by radiation. These ghouls turn out to be the former residents of Vault 12 itself.

  Larger powers move across the map as well. The Brotherhood of Steel is a quasi-religious military order that hunts for pre-war technology and works to restore it. The Children of the Cathedral are an optimistic cult. Super Mutants, nearly immortal humanoids immune to radiation, answer to a creature called the Master. The hero does not have to travel alone, since four companions can be recruited. They are Ian, a mercenary guard from Shady Sands, Tycho, a desert ranger, Katja, of the Followers of the Apocalypse, and Dogmeat, a tireless and loyal dog.

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• 3. Building a Survivor

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  Seven statistics define the Vault Dweller: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. Each can be set from one to ten, but the total may never pass 40. Players can start from a blank sheet or pick one of three ready-made characters. Albert Cole is a charismatic negotiator with a legal background. Natalia Dubrovhsky is an acrobat and the resourceful granddaughter of a Russian diplomat who served in the Soviet consulate in Los Angeles. Max Stone is the largest person in the Vault, known for strength and stamina but not for intelligence. They represent a diplomatic, a deceptive, and a combative approach to the game. The Vault Dweller can be played as male or female, though the character is canonically male.

  Eighteen skills sit on top of those statistics. Each is a learned ability measured as a percentage, and its starting value comes from the primary statistics. Three skills can be tagged for a 20% boost. Traits come in pairs of benefit and drawback, and players choose up to two from a list of sixteen.

  Experience points arrive through the player's actions, and each new level adds points to spend on skills. Every three levels, or four for a character with the Skilled trait, the player chooses a perk. There are 48 regular perks, plus two more that only come from wearing certain armor. Each has prerequisites. The Animal Friend perk, which stops animals from attacking, demands level nine, an intelligence of five or higher, and an outdoorsman skill of 25%.

  The world is viewed from a trimetric angle, and strangers can be bartered with using bottle caps as money. Combat is turn based. Each turn grants a pool of action points that depends on the agility statistic and on certain perks. Attacking, moving, reloading, handling objects, and opening the inventory each cost a different amount. A player can swap quickly between two equipped weapons and aim many of them at specific parts of an enemy. Melee weapons usually offer a swing or a thrust, automatic firearms add a burst mode, and an unarmed hero can still punch or kick.

  Many quests accept more than one answer, whether by talking, fighting, or sneaking. Some even allow results that run against the original request. How a quest is finished raises or lowers the player's reputation, and reputation shapes how other characters respond. Those choices decide which story and gameplay opportunities open up, and they determine how the game ends.

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• 4. The Master's Argument

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  Back in Vault 13 with the water running again, the Overseer is troubled by the mutants the Vault Dweller described. He judges them too widespread and too extreme to be natural, so he assigns a second job: find and stop their source. Clues scattered across the wasteland point to the Mariposa Military Base. There, captured humans are exposed to the Forced Evolutionary Virus, or F.E.V., and become Super Mutants. The Lieutenant, a clever, cybernetically enhanced Super Mutant, runs most of them on the Master's orders. The Master wants every human transformed so that "unity" can be established on Earth. The Children of the Cathedral turn out to be his front, a way to lull people into peaceful submission.

  Two tasks must be finished, and the player picks the order. One is to destroy the vats of F.E.V. inside the base. The other is to kill the Master, who commands his army from a prototype vault hidden beneath the Children's cathedral. Once inside, the Vault Dweller has three options. The Master can be talked into seeing that his plan will fail because Super Mutants are infertile. He can be killed on the spot. Or the cathedral can be destroyed in an explosion.

  Victory does not bring a welcome home. The Overseer refuses to let the Vault Dweller back in, afraid that the hero has changed and that tales of the journey will tempt the inhabitants to leave. The exile is reluctant but firm, and the ending then shows how the hero's choices affected the societies met along the way. A darker path also exists. A player who joins the Master is dunked into the F.E.V. and becomes a Super Mutant. That hero then leads the Master's army back to Vault 13, and security footage shows the massacre.

  The designers wanted the quests to have no clearly right or wrong solutions, so that players could follow whatever suited them. The Master's reasons for uniting the wasteland and making its people immune to radiation can sound persuasive. Assistant designer Scott Bennie described the Master as a figure who sees himself as a well-intentioned hero. He said the team wanted to "hitting the player with an emotional sledgehammer as often as possible" through the story. Writer Tim Cain, who dislikes it when a player character knows more than the player, arranged the narrative so that the Vault Dweller learns only what the player learns.

  The Master himself began as a joke at a design discussion about a faction that swelled its ranks by dipping people into virus vats. Someone asked what would happen if more than one person fell into the same vat. The team imagined a leader fused from a man, a woman, and a computer terminal. Cain enjoyed modelling, animating, and writing the character, especially because the Master spoke in three voices: male, female, and electronic. When the audio director reacted warmly to that idea, every department grew sure the Master would make a great antagonist.

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• 5. Barely Controlled Chaos

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  In early 1994, programmer Tim Cain was building a game engine in his spare time, based on the tabletop system GURPS, short for Generic Universal RolePlaying System. For the first six months he worked on Fallout alone, because Interplay was giving it little attention. He gradually recruited colleagues who could help in their spare hours. After Cain convinced company president Brian Fargo of its promise, Interplay announced in 1994 that it had acquired the GURPS license. The first prototype was finished that same year.

  The team grew slowly. Cain, designer Christopher Taylor, and art director Leonard Boyarsky led a group that reached 15 people in 1995. In 1996, producer Feargus Urquhart pulled in more Interplay staff, bringing the total to 30. Cain called the team "amazing" for its dedication. Urquhart's own description of life under Interplay was "barely controlled chaos."

  The project came close to ending in late 1994. Interplay had just acquired the Dungeons & Dragons licenses for Forgotten Realms and Planescape, and cancelling Fallout looked tempting. Cain persuaded the company to let him finish. Pressure came back in 1997, after the role-playing game Diablo appeared in January. Cain resisted calls to convert Fallout into a real-time multiplayer game.

  A bigger blow came in March 1997, when Interplay dropped the GURPS license after creative differences with Steve Jackson Games, the creator of GURPS. According to Interplay, Jackson objected to the amount of violence and gore. The team needed a replacement ruleset, and it became the internally built SPECIAL system. Taylor and Cain were each given a single week, Taylor to design it and Cain to code it.

  Other decisions were smaller but still shaped the result. The team weighed a first-person 3D design, then dropped it because the models could not carry enough detail. An oblique projection, producing the trimetric view, replaced it. The working title, Vault-13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game, was rejected as a poor fit. Armageddon was considered, but another Interplay project, later cancelled, already held it. Fargo proposed Fallout. For the theme song, the team wanted "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" by the Ink Spots. A copyright problem blocked it, so they used another Ink Spots song, "Maybe."

  Development finished on the 1st of October 1997. It had taken three and a half years and cost about $3 million.

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• 6. Atomic Age Style

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  Interplay's earlier role-playing game Wasteland, from 1988, was the model that Fallout followed. Almost everyone on the team had played it. Fallout could not be a direct sequel, because Electronic Arts, which published Wasteland, refused to license it. Before settling on a post-apocalyptic setting, the team had also considered fantasy and time travel. Taylor wrote a vision statement of the design goals. Cain said it inspired the group and was "a major reason why the game came together at all."

  The look came from the Atomic Age. The artists took cues from 1950s literature and media, including the films Forbidden Planet (1956), A Boy and His Dog (1975), and Mad Max (1979). The underground base in A Boy and His Dog shaped the design of the vaults. Boyarsky reportedly loved the cheerful Cold War posters of the era. The team also loved X-COM, and before the GURPS license ended, Fallout combat resembled it. Star Control II (1992) was Cain's model for open-ended design.

  Humor ran through the details. Cain wrote the prologue, which gave the series its catchphrase: "War. War never changes." Vault Boy and his sunny manner mocked how 1950s media played down the dangers of nuclear war. Pop culture references were welcome only if a player did not need to know the source to understand them. The Slayer perk, named for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, simply turns every attack into a critical hit.

  The characters took work. The sprites were highly detailed and demanded a great deal of memory from the computers of the day. Twenty-one non-player characters were voiced by actors, among them Tony Shalhoub, Keith David, Brad Garrett, CCH Pounder, Tony Jay, and Clancy Brown, with Perlman as the narrator. Scott Redenhizer made most of the "talking heads" that appear during conversations. Each took eight weeks to build. The process began with sculpted clay heads, which the team studied to decide which areas should move most. A Faro Space Arm and VertiSketch digitized the heads, LightWave 3D handled corrections, and Adobe Photoshop produced the textures. Voice recording took a few months. Designer Mark O'Green wrote much of the dialogue, and Taylor thought his method both efficient and impressive.

  The companions arrived late and were hard to build. They were full of glitches, including a habit of shooting the Vault Dweller when standing in the line of fire. Dogmeat was added first. Tycho was a nod to the desert rangers of Wasteland.

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• 7. Shelves and Scores

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  A demo reached players on the 26th of April 1997, though Taylor felt it showed the game poorly. Fallout never had a trailer. Boyarsky and lead artist Jason D. Anderson made the advertisements instead. The box was shaped like a lunch box, and the manual imitated a survival guide. Fallout reached North America on the 10th of October 1997 for MS-DOS and Windows, and Interplay's MacPlay division handled the Mac OS version. Version 1.1 followed on the 13th of November 1997, fixing many bugs and lifting the time limit.

  Europe did not get the game at first, because players could kill children in it. Version 1.2 removed the children and was released there at an unspecified date. MacPlay later brought Fallout to Mac OS X in 2002. In April 2009 it was bundled with its sequels Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel as Fallout Trilogy. To mark its 20th anniversary, Steam made it free for a time on the 30th of September 2017.

  Reviewers were enthusiastic. PC PowerPlay predicted that Fallout would revive the genre. GameSpot said gamers no longer had to wait for a good role-playing game. GamePro called the character system the best part, and The Washington Post liked its realistic tradeoffs. The setting felt fresh because it left behind the traditional fantasy worlds. The Electric Playground called the cinematic introduction "the most haunting opening movie" its reviewer had seen. Computer Gaming World complained that the dialogue could not keep up with a player's unpredictability. It also said the turn-based combat "might bore or disappoint Diablo fans, but will be welcome to most hard-core RPGers." Several critics disliked that companions could not be controlled directly.

  Trophies followed. GameSpot named it Best Role-Playing Game and gave it Best Ending, while Computer Games Magazine and Computer Gaming World each named it Role-Playing Game of the Year. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated it at the first Interactive Achievement Awards.

  Sales were respectable rather than spectacular. Fallout entered the PC Data computer game rankings for October 1997 at No. 12, and it sold 53,777 copies in the United States by the end of that year. By March 2000 the United States total had reached 144,000. In 2017, Fargo said that Fallout had sold 600,000 copies in total. It missed sales expectations and trailed Baldur's Gate and Diablo, but it sold well enough to justify a sequel.

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• 8. Echoes Across Games

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  The mid-1990s had been a slump for role-playing games, hurt by stale settings, competition from other genres, and weak quality control. Writing in 2000, Mark H. Walker of CNET Gamecenter said the revival began when Fallout reached store shelves. Rowan Kaiser called it the "first modern role-playing game." Its post-apocalyptic world stood apart from the Tolkien-style fantasy that dominated the field. Kaiser argued that any modern game with a morality system traces back to it. At the 2012 Game Developers Conference, Cain described traits shared by later role-playing games, including open worlds, ambiguous morality, and perks.

  The people behind it carried the ideas forward. After leaving Interplay in 1998, Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson formed Troika Games and made Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura in 2001. Cain called Fallout a stepping stone to that game. At Obsidian Entertainment, Cain and Boyarsky later created The Outer Worlds in 2019. Fargo founded inXile Entertainment, where Wasteland 2 was built in 2014 with Anderson and Fallout composer Mark Morgan on the team. A feature like perks, called feats, was added to the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

  The Master has aged especially well. GameSpot called Cummings's voice "chilling" and named the villain one of the most memorable antagonists in computer-gaming history. Critics praised the finale's multiple solutions, and the boss fight itself is optional. Many writers singled out the option to convince the Master that he is wrong. IGN took that as proof that dialogue can be as valid as fighting in a role-playing game.

  The rights passed to Bethesda Softworks in 2007, after Interplay had owned them. Cain had left during the making of Fallout 2 and worked on no later sequels. Fallout 2 came out in 1998, Fallout 3 in 2008, and Fallout 4 in 2015. Spin-offs included Fallout: New Vegas in 2010 and Fallout 76 in 2018. Interplay wrote a film script in 1998, but the project ended when Interplay Films dissolved in 2000.

  A television adaptation, with Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as executive producers, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on the 10th of April 2024. Cain praised how well it matched the mood of the series. The show also sent players back to the original. According to Steam Charts, the first Fallout saw a 160% increase in its player base, peaking at 2,300 players.

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