Fallout Retrospective

And once you got out into that wilderness, you found yourself surrounded by unrelenting devastation. There's no helpful town situated nearby, just raiders and scavengers and a motley assortment of unsavoury characters struggling to survive in a world that no longer has room for things like compassion. The closest thing to a settlement, Junktown, is a ramshackle assortment of buildings inhabited by grasping despots, killing each other for guns or drugs or money. Fallout throws you into a genuinely destroyed world, and there's nothing about it that's heartening. It's all the more disquieting for how realistic it is. One of the most striking things about Fallout's imagining of post-apocalyptic America is how accurate it could well be; all the positive aspects of human nature fall away in a grimy and pointless struggle for survival.

Scott Bennie, a designer who helped to write and design Fallout along with Chris Avellone (who later wrote Planescape: Torment and is now the creative director at Obsidian) and Fallout 2 hero Chris Taylor, felt that Fallout's bleak setting struck a particular chord with audiences of the time. "After years of generic fantasy RPGs, Fallout was a shock to the system, both for the designers (who got to cut loose after working on fantasy projects like Stonekeep and Descent to Undermountain) and for the audience... There weren't that many post-apocalypse games out at the time we did Fallout," says Bennie. "Wasteland was excellent, but it was severely hamstrung by the limitations of the textual display. Origins' Bad Blood was designed to be an action game. The less said about EA's Fountain of Dreams, the better. As a result of the genre's scarcity - and the appropriateness of graphic violence, harsh language, and a gritty theme - it was easy for Fallout to stand out. Being christened the 'spiritual successor' to Wasteland, one of the most beloved RPGs up to that time, made it even easier to get noticed."

Gameplay innovations went hand-in-hand with the game's unique and dark setting. Fallout was a genuine role-player in that it was impossible to succeed in the wasteland without taking full advantage of every ability that your created character had. If you came across a heavily-guarded compound and just didn't have the firepower to get inside, you had to start hacking computers and looking for pass-codes, or talking to people around in an effort to find someone who could get you inside, or scavenging or thieving better equipment from wherever you could. There were always so many ways to approach a given situation, so many different directions to go in and so many random events, characters and quests to stumble upon, that almost everyone who played Fallout got something different out of it.

There is perhaps no greater illustration of that than Fallout's final showdown with the Master, a sprawling mess of computer, mutant and human led down a twisted path on his search for humanity. By the time you reach him, you've experienced the darkest that Fallout's wastelands have to offer, met its most hopelessly forsaken characters and become embroiled in the struggle for power over what little the world has left to offer. You'll almost certainly have the necessary firepower to storm in and take him down. But instead, you can embark upon a philosophical conversation with him, challenge him on what makes humanity worth preserving. You can persuade him to see the darkness in what he is doing, and if you succeed, he commits suicide, taking his entire mutant enclave with him.