Fallout

Fallout takes place in an America that lost a nuclear war and never left the 1950s. Tim Cain started the first game at Interplay in 1994, alone, on a project nobody had asked for. Four studios have made Fallout games since, and the story has now moved to Prime Video.

1997: a game nobody had ordered

Tim Cain started writing a role-playing game at Interplay in 1994. It was not an official Interplay project, and he worked alone for about six months before two colleagues joined him. The game came out in October 1997, made by Interplay's role-playing division, which took the name Black Isle Studios the following year.

Interplay wanted a sequel to Wasteland, its post-apocalyptic game from 1988, but Electronic Arts held the rights. The team built a new world instead. Christopher Taylor designed S.P.E.C.I.A.L., the seven traits, from strength to luck, that decide what a character can do. Every Fallout game still uses them.

The first two games were seen from above, and combat stopped at every turn for the player to decide each action. Leonard Boyarski set the look: instead of grey ruins, the America of 1950s advertising, left intact. Pastel colours, swing records, and Vault Boy, a cartoon mascot selling nuclear shelters with his thumb up. Fallout 2 came in October 1998.

2004: Interplay sells Fallout, and the games change shape

Micro Forté made Fallout Tactics in 2001, a squad combat game rather than a role-playing game. The press rated it around 82 on Metacritic. Players were harder on it, mostly for one reason: the Brotherhood of Steel had been a closed order that kept its technology to itself, and Tactics turned it into an army that recruits anyone.

Interplay was running out of money. In 2004 it sold Bethesda Softworks the right to make Fallout games, closed Black Isle Studios, then sold the franchise itself in 2007 for 5.75 million dollars.

Fallout 3 arrived in October 2008 and changed the genre. The camera moved behind the character's eyes, combat no longer waited for anyone, and the ruins of Washington DC were open from the first hour. Obsidian Entertainment, founded by former Black Isle staff, made Fallout: New Vegas two years later. Bethesda added settlement building in Fallout 4 (2015) and put the world online in Fallout 76 (2018).

Fallout 3 got the scores, New Vegas got the players

The specialist press gave Fallout 3 a 91 on Metacritic and New Vegas an 84. Readers of the same site placed them the other way round, at roughly 7.9 against 8.4. Fifteen years on, the community still plays New Vegas and still writes mods for it.

That single point cost Obsidian money. Its contract with Bethesda promised the studio a bonus if the game reached 85. It stopped at 84, and Obsidian was paid nothing.

Fallout 76 went the other way. It launched in November 2018 with no human characters except the other players, only robots and recordings, and reviewers put it near 50. Wastelanders brought people into the world in 2020, and the game has been rebuilt ever since. The scores it still carries describe a version nobody can play.

The Prime Video series sends 65 million viewers back to the games

The series arrived in April 2024. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner run it, with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy producing. It belongs to the official story of the games: it takes place in 2296, long after the last of them, and treats the events of the games as its own history.

Amazon reported 65 million viewers in sixteen days. Player numbers rose at the same time, and Fallout 4 returned to the top of the Steam charts. Most adaptations depend on people who already know the games. This one produced new players instead.

Two things outgrew the games. People now borrow Vault Boy to mock any institution that answers a disaster with reassurance. And the line that opens every game, "War. War never changes.", is quoted by people who have never held a controller.