Triumph In Blog

Fallout then and Fallout now: What the Hell Happened?

I meant to write this around the time of the new Fallout season’s announcement, but I was halted by a powerful wave of “who cares?” I wanted very badly to come to my writing space and whine about the folly of adapting video games into other formats in general, let alone the specific task of confining an open-ended RPG into a mindless, narrative television program. But I resisted, because I figured it’s all been done; obviously adapting video games into other things is dumb if your intent is to make something that is a meaningful continuation of the original material, perhaps as some kind of new perspective or expansion on some aspect of the game that doesn’t theoretically demand interactivity. You could make a show about a character from a game, or a movie about an event in a game, etc., and as long as the game has some kind of written, narrative component, it’s only a quick trick of screenwriting. Nothing complex or intellectual about that, necessarily.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s why things like the Fallout show are made. I watched enough of the first season to make me mad (like half of it,) but it only took one episode of the second season to hollow out my soul. None of these ugly, cookie-cutter miniseries things are made with any intent of expanding on the original material, video games or otherwise, and they aren’t even made as boring retreads of existing stories. They’re made explicitly for people who are not familiar with the source material, and often made by those same people, for some reason. Cook the streaming service books by allocating a ton of money to some shitty scripts, throw on a veneer of some existing “intellectual property” as an advertising exercise. You’ll get views from bored people who don’t care about continuity but also hateviews from curious fans. On top of it all, it’s gotta be way easier to produce something that already has a bunch of concept art and backstory to pull from! Too much cynicism to even get into, considering how fatalistic I’ve been on this blog before, but sadly this thought process works. I certainly wouldn’t have ever thought about this stupid show if it didn’t say “Fallout” on it and have people in vault suits. But, beyond a few hideous, superficial similarities to Fallout 4 (and essentially nothing else,) there is nothing “Fallout” about it.

Obviously an Amazon Prime Original ™ streaming show is gonna be ugly, annoying, and meaningless. So I guess I can’t complain too much about that, because it’s not the first or last trash fire our culture industry has scavenged from existing works of art for ad revenue. Instead, I want to complain a little bit about how this specific show is a scientifically significant betrayal of the original Fallout‘s mood and mystique, and in general how Bethesda’s Fallout has managed to all but erase the original games from cultural memory. To start, I will include a section with a critique of the original Fallout, a deeply misunderstood and misrepresented mess of old comic books and TTRPGs that few care to consider today. That’s a bold claim considering its theoretical popularity, I know, but it seems that far fewer people–even among “gamers” and “insiders”–have played it than you might think, or they at least fail to understand its depth. I believe Fallout is the great American game, and it summarizes many different worldviews, attitudes, and histories into one world where video games bottlenecked before and after.

Then, I will discuss a little bit about the Bethesda reboot, Fallout 3, and try to avoid copying pedantic details from Wikipedia about Van Buren. We know that Interplay sold the rights and we know who went where and when, but why did Bethesda alter the vision for Fallout’s world to be so different, and what were they trying to cultivate? Why do these factions exist? Why does this alt-history pseudotechnology exist? etc. etc. It is worth discussing how beloved all the Fallout games are in spite of the fact that we have all, fans and non-fans alike, simply watched as it has been bastardized and rewritten while seeming to care little for what has actually changed in the game’s design, not just the visual style.

Last, I would like to discuss why this Fallout show, from the perspective of an adaptation, fails to understand why the original game(s) contains the details it does. It would be too simple to attack the show for being gray, unfunny, and cheap: you would expect that in context. But this new season shows me that the showrunners have literally zero regard for even the simplest concerns of the games, and would rather jumble up details at random and throw them at the wall to see what “sticks,” i.e. allows for a punch-line in the teleplay. How did we get to this point with the Fallout world, and why would we even bother to call this show by its name?

Indulge me for a little while then, while I avoid talking about how annoying Fallout 2’s sense of humor is, and how Fallout: New Vegas was over 50% DLC. Those games are generally more well-regarded as respectful, consistent sequels, and their divergences from Fallout and Fallout 3 respectively are more nuanced than my writings need to discuss. Our goal is to determine how Fallout became what it is now, making it more relevant to discuss the beginning in Fallout, the reboot in Fallout 3 (the successful one, that is, because one of them came and went in 2004 to no fanfare whatsoever,) and then the redesign and the current brand expansion of 76 and the television show.

Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game

As a question of pure, clinical design, Fallout is in many ways typical of other isometric RPGs from its time. It is worth discussing the game’s technical decisions at a distance, but the overall development of style is what makes Fallout endure. It is not a formal exercise, nor is it meant to be an especially complicated system. In fact, I believe that the few idiosyncrasies of Fallout’s role-playing system are built outward from a central, abstract thesis, rather than an in-depth technical experience. The game exists in service of a highly specific atmosphere, and the pursuit of certain politically-charged imagery within. What kind of mood are we trying to create in the original Fallout? That is a question I believe has been lost to time in the litany of sequels and spin-offs.

Fallout is designed to allow for a range of player-created characters, but validation for those characters’ roles or actions within context is presented almost as an afterthought: a brief slideshow at the end. In fact, the premise given to the player is almost immediately revealed to be an almost secondary narrative to various, larger forces in a conflict entirely removed from themselves. The player will create a vault dweller with a set of stats, exit the vault with a goal to find a water chip, and then be given the freedom to go in any arbitrarily chosen direction. Traveling in certain directions is suggested and perhaps “expected” (Shady Sands, Junktown, etc.), but the player is given full autonomy to travel across a vast desert and slowly piece together their own picture of an alien society at will.

Simply put, the world is the player’s oyster. A large desert is placed in front of them, dotted with locations intended to represent real-life historical events and ideologies, sporadically placed for long travel times in-between. This gives the impression of an enormous space, with the bulk of the player’s time spent on a map screen, waiting for mutant bugs or Mad Max villains to provide them simple combat encounters for tools and experience. Playing the game for any length of time will make it clear that navigating this huge world via the map screen makes up for nearly half the playtime. Now, creating an open or even semi-open world is not explicitly a new concept, even for the time of Fallout. No matter what direction one chooses, the game’s difficulty rather conventionally scales up as one would expect for an RPG at the time. Combat encounters within this space are designed to be routine and simple, placed on a weighted grid for difficulty and with the option to easily escape at any time. The mechanical functions of the game are almost minimized, kept in-line with superficial genre expectations in order to make strategic decisions pan out quickly.

This is how the game prioritizes empty space; even with the unique “SPECIAL” system for character creation and a significant set of skills and modifiers, almost everything a player does with the choices made in character generation is oriented toward simplifying their interactions with other beings. Time is meant to be spent wandering around and charting the foreign land in front of you. Unlike a traditional role-playing game (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons or GURPS,) things like bonds, flaws, or classes are simply absent from the system. A character has only the most basic properties and skills necessary to shoot, get shot, and talk to an NPC about shooting related activities outside the map screen. You may opt for a build with high perception and a focus on gun-related skills, for example, but you have no set alignment or personality from the beginning. You have one bar of points to spend on everything per turn during combat, and your time outside combat consists of isolated places with unconnected moral quandaries. Less Baldur’s Gate and more XCOM, while your conduct during said quandaries is only tracked by a single variable for “reputation,” which affects hilariously little.

It would be dishonest to say that these interactions with combat or with dialogue simply don’t matter. There most certainly is a bit of a curve to finding what weapons or companions do or don’t appeal to you. But that superficial appeal is essentially all there is to it; all approaches will inevitably tend toward ending encounters quickly and returning to the solitude and ambient music. The stripped-back, utilitarian approach is what allows for more time wandering around taking in the sights. With so many hours spent in this empty space, traveling between the places with long-form interactions, the player is left with an enormous sense of loneliness. Despite the series’ renown for having many memorable characters and places, this first entry seems to make just about everything human feel transient.

Speaking to people is always in a transactional context, and fulfilling their requests is always in service of material gain. The player is a drifter and the game is quick to tell them so. The atmosphere is intentionally dreary and cynical, yet often confusing in its attempts to throw random bursts of humor at the player. Reality can often feel contradictory in this way. Cultivating that contradiction seems to be the overall goal of this approach to design, with minimized combat and maximized meandering: why do we want to continue drifting through a world that feels like this? A world that’s recognizable and often amusing in being so, but somehow devoid of conscious life?

To be a lonely drifter carries with it a sense of freedom, something the game freely exploits to let players experiment with evil debauchery or fancy themselves a folk hero. But this “drifter” characterization is as much an attempt to fulfill a violent, juvenile fantasy as it is a way to illustrate the atomization that has led to the prevalence of such fantasies. A giant empty America with only isolated colonies of freaks toting drugs and guns, blissfully unaware that the world has already ended, but chugging along anyway. To be immersed in this sad, empty husk of America is to be made aware of how similar it is to real, actual America, but without falling back on puerile allegories or criticisms of what we already know. It would be facile to throw some art deco buildings around and show armored thugs executing civilians at random–yes, America is fascist; we live here, we know!–so what might the future hold, if we do some introspection now?

Those same people chugging along after the apocalypse could be onto something big without knowing it. Maybe the bombs didn’t change anything, and maybe we don’t need to recover the old world. The player as the Yojimbo in the center gets to make their decision about the worthiness or even plausibility of an American future at their own leisure, traveling at will to many different places with many different political organizations, some old and some new. Which systems may survive in the future? Who is still clinging to the world before the war, and where is it getting them? What place do the new races and even species of intelligent people have in a larger political order? Are we so far past Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Arnold that we only see these alternative history exercises as jokes or signposts? Can we even imagine a future?

These are questions that Fallout’s solitude begs us to consider. Running around like a maniac shooting anything green will afford the player a very short and placid experience. We are encouraged by the game’s design to feel like interlopers as players, and we will learn nothing if we do not study the environment around us to an extent. The acerbic references to Americana new and old give that disgusting, often horrific environment a sick familiarity. Travel to Necropolis and see how a new class of marginalized people has been created and how they try to meet their needs; travel to the Lost Hills and see how the people serving pre-war interests are seemingly consumed by solipsism to the extent of trapping themselves in a bunker; travel to The Hub and see how the decentralization of capital and breakdown of production models has returned the people to petty tribalism, even as they attempt to cling to anemic ideas of legalism. Plenty of time wandering between these places, fending for oneself, witnessing firsthand the cruel world these societies built themselves up to escape…if I get this water chip for my vault, as instructed in the beginning, what will I do? Go back to hiding in a hole from any number of potential futures to which I have already grown accustomed?

When a single antagonist is finally revealed to us as “The Master,” he is a twisted mass of flesh that has absorbed the personalities of multiple people and stored them in a computer as a hive, which also houses his body. Though the game does not “end” until you face both he and his reserve army of mutants in separate dungeon crawls, it is the meeting with him that codifies the game’s thesis I’ve alluded to. While the player has been soldiering through the desert shooting dogs and hiring prostitutes, they will forget that this new world they’re navigating has a whole century of its own history. There is a certain America we recognize in reality and a certain America we are exposed to in our travels through the game; reconciling them is already a “struggle of opposites” large enough to demand our attention. But what if these dialectics are already too little, too late? What if someone has already developed a synthesis, and isn’t keen on waiting for us?

The Master is a mutant, but to an inconceivable degree: though once a human (Richard Grey,) he has been exposed so thoroughly to so many unnatural processes to alter his mind and body that he has become an entirely new and powerful being. These beings are called “psykers” in-game–an astute reference to Warhammer: 40,000 considering both worlds’ fixation on morally grey, indeterminate futures with fascist undertones–and they are capable of telepathic communications with each other and with machinery. The Master creates these psykers using a designer virus formed before the nuclear war, and plans to raise an army of “super mutants” with it that can “unify” the wasteland as a single, collective consciousness of pyskers. To do this, he is going to expose everyone in the wasteland (consenting or otherwise) to the virus through subterfuge or force, whichever is faster.

He claims to be doing this in order to save the wasteland’s people from the strife they have faced in their brief, irradiated existence and bring a new era of peace to the world. His plan is morally dubious, of course, and when the player meets him he has already attempted to use force to stop them at many occasions. In the moment, the player is obligated to fight back against The Master, killing him and annihilating his facilities to prevent him from ostensibly enslaving the wasteland. But still, the player does have a brief choice to join him in his crusade; if the player is meant to judge the viability of post-nuclear American life from their unique position, does it not stand to reason that The Master is a potential future to be considered? His vision for psychoactive, unified human consciousness is sort of sound when you consider, in context, that he has made it scientifically possible. Plus, his radical view of collectivism is, in a sense, historically consistent with all the most successful attempts to reject what we understand as dogmatic American politics.

The Master’s army is somehow a new people struggling to be born. The virus that accidentally spawned The Master himself may have forced him to evolve sooner than the world was ready for (hence it’s in-game name, the “Forced Evolutionary Virus,”) but now the player has to contend with him anyway. How can a world that was practically just created be faced with another painful rebirth? But at the same time, can it survive in its current state anyway? It’s a bizarre and sort of sad conundrum; The Master is cognizant that he has to force his plan onto the world. Because, even with the incredible potential it suggests for humanity (to be psychic superbeings,) the world may simply not be prepared to evolve in this way. The Master is a single actor with a grand fantasy not unlike the player, yet the player is most likely going to symbolically annihilate him, preventing one potential future entirely. Ironically, that future is insane and imperceptible but predicates obsessively on a technology of the past.

The game’s thesis is thus: we have spent too much time looking backwards. The disembodied voice of Ron Perlman is quick to tell us that “war never changes,” but war is only one pillar of the American conscience. All these potential future societies are built from the scavenged bones of our most intimate American memories: the roads, the guns, the paranoias, and, cruelly, the advertisements. Even the most alien, most perverse components of the Fallout world are plastered with the technological, graphical, and commercial symbols of mid-century American opulence. If the post-nuclear future is already contingent on our ability to learn from our mistakes and build something new–the possibility that the player is meant to consider–how difficult would it be, then, to imagine a post-post-nuclear future? A future where the lingering effects of fascist nostalgia are rendered, in a sense, physiologically null? The confrontation with The Master is meant to force the player to make the judgment they’ve been formulating through their travels, the horrible decision of what futures should or should not come to pass.

The Master’s defeat, though initially tragic and grotesque, is then a very useful exercise intellectually. To ask these questions of metaphysics, to propose this idea of “transhumanism” and to try to force the very nature of humanity to change–is it not very premature? The post-nuclear world is as unfit to meet its inhabitants physical, material needs as the world it has succeeded. How could a player who has been paying attention join his “unity,” knowing that it would essentially erase humanity after it barely survived the first attempt? Knowing that The Master weaponizes fascist rhetoric to dress his plan up as something far less violent than it is, and knowing that the nature of the virus he intends to use would render his theoretical master race inert and infertile over time? The Master thinks in an ideologically, morally sound manner, yet his overall plan reflects a certain misanthropy and disdain for the world he claims to be absolving. The American people are stricken with disaster and suffering, so the solution is simply to wash all the people away and start over with something new and “better?” He fancies himself a god with no concern for the actual desires of the humans he considers mere subjects; the obvious symbolism of his cult and their religious worship of his ideas is the natural consequence of this thinking.

Juxtapose the church’s reputation for benevolence as a smokescreen for their crimes with the Brotherhood of Steel’s reputation for xenophobia and greed that they seldom lie about. They appear different, but are both grim mirrors of the America that spawned them; organizations with ulterior motives that hold more than enough power to create a prosperous future for the wasteland, but refuse to do so out of blind solipsism and paranoia. High ideals about recompense for the past overshadow obvious concerns about the future, and now a war is threatening to tear all those ideals to shreds. The player will become responsible for resolving this war by choosing a side, should they survive long enough to meet these factions.

The morbid knowledge these events impart on us is that the quest we have undertaken to conceptualize a new America is, inescapably, a zero-sum game. One side will win and one will lose, and we will once again return to the lonely, meandering desert until the next war begins to brew. The past, the future, and even The Master’s future after the future–they are inexorably linked to warfare and violence. All the small potatoes of tribal disputes, caravan robberies, or giant scorpions gettin’ in the shed again, these things are all in the foreground of war’s gigantic, terrifying stage. The people are resilient, and life goes on after the apocalypse. The other side of that proverbial coin is that “life” in America simply is war, so war too will go on. Was Ron Perlman right after all?

This is why Fallout is important to consider. It is quintessentially American, and it teaches us about what ideologies we truly cannot divorce ourselves from. It is easier to imagine a future of endless violence and combat than to imagine a future of peace and wealth, even when we conjure up the perverse scenario of a world “wiped clean” by atomic bombs. The fantasy of the vault dweller, the all-knowing and all-powerful catalyst who exists outside the political reality of the world they are thrust into, can still only influence the future of that world as a participant in non-stop bloodshed. The American dream of the lone hero who can change the world through their Nietzschean will is tested to its full limits in the system of Fallout. The pilot in control of this hero can rely only on their own understanding of American reality in order to bring any semblance of piece to this American fiction.

And so, this is how Fallout develops its style into something that serves its thesis. That lonely, alienating atmosphere is how our American mind is able to slip so comfortably into the world presented. Were it a simple barrage of parody commercials and action movie references, what would we learn? That our culture is crass? That is nothing new. We do not want to “describe the wretchedness of the world” (Godard) alone, we want to put our preconceptions to the test and take meaning away. Fallout does this by beguiling us with an engrossing fantasy, then revealing to us the dangers of accepting that fantasy at face value. We spend all this time taking in the empty desert and having our interactivity streamlined to an incredible level of simplicity, yet the instinctual conception of killing is something we must be consciously made aware of. How quickly we forget to even think about warfare as something separate from our lives when presented with a world so eerily similar to our own, that so thoroughly replicates our own narcissism. The question of violence in video games has been recycled and retread so many times now, yet the most precise and piercing examination was performed almost 30 years ago, right here!

Special thanks to Matt K. for editing and consulting on this piece.