Fallout - the computer game
The first computer game in the Fallout series was published in 1997. Titled Fallout, it was developed by one of the greatest game companies in history: Black Isle Studios. Fallout had a number of clear antecedents, most importantly the post-apocalypse novels such as Damnation Alley, written by Roger Zelazny in 1969, and movies like The Road Warrior, and Escape from New York, both released in 1981. There was a computer game which directly inspired Fallout called Wasteland, released in 1988.
Fallout was an extraordinary game, nearly perfect in art, plot, and game design. The fact that there have been ten games published in the same world as Fallout, and the games have collectively sold millions of copies, shows that Fallout touched a cord, it hit something important.
You start out the game with a quest: your home town (a Vault, underground) is dying. Everyone you grew up with will die if you don’t go on a heroic quest to find the Holy Grail (the water chip in the game) and bring it back to your community.
Your character then steps out into the unknown world, armed with a pistol and two clips of ammunition. You are dressed in a Star Trek suit which offers no protection at all from the environment. And the world you go out into? It is a blasted, hellish landscape filled with deadly animals, ruined towns, and brutally vicious humans. It was easy to lose Fallout. One of the first monsters you might choose to fight was the Golden Gecko, a powerful beast with strong armor and a bite which could kill you as you fruitlessly shot at it with your - clearly inadequate - pistol.
The great start to Fallout is: you know nothing about the world. You are alone and most everything you meet is trying to kill you. Because a nuclear war occurred a century ago, your knowledge of geography is useless. Almost every town & city has been destroyed and you find typically find ruins inhabited by monsters. Many of the people you meet are about as ignorant as you are since all of American civilization has been swept away. The ruins are everywhere and you - your character - has nearly total freedom. In most situations in Fallout, you can choose to help or harm anyone you meet.
The game designers: Tim Cain, Chris Taylor, and artist Leonard Boyarsky, created a world which was both familiar and ruined. Their world was one where many decisions were only meaningful to you. In a real sense, this game was a Western, set in the mountains and deserts of the south western USA. You only survived the game by being really dangerous. Sneaking could only take you so far, and fast talk didn’t work against most monsters.
The underlying theme of Fallout is where do you find meaning in life when civilization has been destroyed? You constantly ran across the remains of American life, cities which once were the homes of thousands, now desolate, inhabited only by mutant animals and mindless ghouls. Fallout asks the question: what if you woke up one day to find that instead of 20 million people living in your country, there were less than a thousand? What would you do? What would the survivors do?
In one sense, this is an American story. How many times in history have men ventured into an expansive landscape which had no existing government? It happened (Russian exploration of Siberia, Spanish settlers into Argentina) but it’s very rare. It happened in the USA, over and over, as American settlers ventured further and further west, armed with guns which they kept improving, while the native Indians they encountered got fewer in number and had increasingly worse technology.
(The map - yes, this is southern California and Nevada)
Movement - on a map and on the ground
Fallout is built around a map, which starts out largely blank. As you move, the map fills in, sort of. Most of the map is empty but some of the zones are special; these are points of interest such as towns, vaults, mines, and highly radioactive regions which will kill you unless you have taken special precautions. So the game is an exploration of the unknown - again, very much like the American settler experience from 1605 to 1880.
In the places of interest, the map is transformed, now you see your character walking, running, sneaking past rocks, cactuses, partially ruined houses, and sometimes one of the Vaults. Vaults are places just like where your character grew up, high-tech with concrete walls, electricity, and computers. The Vaults are nearly all dystopian nightmares, either abandoned, or filled with monsters, or worse - deadly robots and Super Mutants.
The underlying message is, the world which used to exist, before the nuclear war, was terrible in its mental state. Sure, the people could build an underground lair with with clean water and electric lights, but they lived like rats in a cage and they went mad, cut off from the natural world. In later games this theme would be explored in greater detail.
Above ground, the world was ruined but some people were trying to rebuild, mostly using the detritus of the old world. Below ground, in the vaults, its pure horror.
All in all, Fallout was a great game. You had a high level of freedom of how you wished to act, though the story had a clear path. In addition, you got steadily better, more powerful, with better equipment. The progression was real. Monsters which once could kill you, you now dispatched with ease using your plasma rifle or light machine gun. Eventually you gained the ultimate in protection: Powered armor.
(Your character, in a vault, wearing powered armor, with a plasma rifle. End Game power)
Becoming A Knight
As befitting an Arthurian quest to find the Holy Grail, your character becomes a knight. You get a suit of Powered Armor which makes you nearly immune to ordinary weapons, protects you from radiation, boosts your strength, and looks very imposing. The designers hit a home run with this idea and the quest to get a suit of powered armor is a major element in every Fallout game.
The idea of powered armor was created by the great writer Robert Heinlein for his novel Starship Troopers (published in 1959). Heinlein came up with a genius idea for future warfare: the personal tank. If - IF - we could create a compact power source, we could put a soldier into an exo-skeleton and then fully protect that soldier from radiation, poison gas, bullets, shrapnel, bayonets, etc. It would be like a tank but better: more mobile, easier to conceal, a great morale booster. By now, most people have seen the movie Iron Man (2008). Iron Man’s combat suit is an improved version of Powered Armor because it can fly. It should be clear to the reader that a group of soldiers in powered armor would destroy any military formation on Earth today.
Note: In our world, we haven’t invented a compact, safe, power source which you can wear, so infantry are still being sent into battle in 2023 clad in little more than street clothes. Powered armor is still just a dream.
In the game, Powered Armor is very real and ultra-desirable. You get Powered Armor by joining the Knights of the Round Table - or as they are called in Fallout: The Brotherhood of Steel. Once you get Powered Armor, you are ready to deal with the ultimate bad guy and win the game.
The Ending
Fallout had a great ending: you return back to your home, Vault 13, having saved everyone, and they don’t let you in! You have been changed, you no longer fit in with the insular society of the Vault. You have to head out into the world above ground and live your life.
This is a perfect for young men in this era. You grow, you challenge yourself. You get powerful. You strike out on your own. The game ends and now its up to you to build your own life. Adult life begins.
What Does It Mean?
We live in a highly constrained world, and it’s getting more constrained year-by-year. China’s totalitarian Social Credit System is very close to being implemented in every major nation around the world. Although we don’t have a single Mega-Corp that is trying to kill the human race just to make more short-term profits, it’s clear to the Sonoma Sage that Big Pharma (exemplified by Pfizer Corp) would release a virus which made everyone kind-of-sick so long as they could sell everyone a drug which alleviated (but did not cure) the symptoms. Quarterly profits for Pfizer clearly trump any issues like the common good or basic morality.
Fallout imagines a new world, built on the wreckage of America, circa 1970. Is the world of Fallout worse than today? Yes it is, but the survivors would - potentially - be free. The genius of the designers was to recognize that for most people, this new world, free of incompetent government and immoral corporations would be pretty horrible for most people, especially women and children. Fallout is a modern fantasy, but not a fantasy set in the past with knights and dragons. Instead, its a fantasy set in a future where education, taxes, bureaucracy, corporations, law, mass transit, public health, have all blown away - gone with the wind. Fallout is a bit like things were in America at the edge of the frontier.
Fallout gained millions of fans, not just in America but from people in most major nations in the world. Fallout is a fantasy for the modern age.
There are many guides to the game Fallout. Here is a very good one by Per Jorner.
The still-active web site for all things related to the Fallout series is: No Mutants Allowed.