Fallout (1997): A Wasteland With a 1950s Heart

When people say Fallout, they now usually mean the first-person, Bethesda-era games or the recent television series. The original is something else: a top-down, turn-based role-playing game from Interplay, released for the PC in 1997, and one of the most distinctive tonal creations of its decade.

The setting is an alternate future built from the atomic-age optimism of the 1950s, where the Cold War never ended and technology developed along its own path, with retro-futuristic robots and bulky computers, until nuclear war destroyed the world. You play a resident of Vault 13, one of many underground shelters, sent out into the wasteland to find a replacement water chip before your vault runs out of water. Your character is commonly called the Vault Dweller. There is a time limit, which is unusual, and it adds pressure to every decision about exploration.

The tone is the thing. The opening plays a vintage song by The Ink Spots over images of a ruined world, a contrast that told players exactly what kind of game this was: cheerful surface, grim contents. The “Vault Boy” mascot, smiling through every perk and penalty, is the same joke in graphic form. Wasteland towns are small, dry and cynical, and the violence is graphic and darkly funny in ways that suited the game’s world.

Then there is the rules system. The game was originally being developed to use the GURPS tabletop role-playing system, but the licensor, Steve Jackson Games, reportedly objected to the game’s violent content, and the project moved to a custom system. The result was SPECIAL, an acronym for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. Tim Cain, who led the project, is widely credited as the driving force behind the game’s design. SPECIAL is straightforward but expressive, and it has survived through later entries in the series.

What set Fallout apart from its peers was consequence. Skills matter, and not just for combat. A character with high Speech can talk their way past confrontations that would otherwise require a fight, and a character with a very low Intelligence gets dialogue that reflects it. Even the final confrontation can, reportedly under the right conditions, be resolved by argument rather than bullets. That range of solutions gives the game replay value, and it made players feel that their build was a statement about who their character was.

Combat itself is turn-based, with action points governing how much a character can do each turn, and targeted shots to the eyes, legs or head. It has been called both tactical and slow, sometimes by the same person on the same afternoon. That is fair.

The game was a critical success and spawned Fallout 2 in 1998, as well as the tactical spin-off Fallout Tactics years later. The main series then went quiet, in part because of Interplay’s financial troubles, until Bethesda acquired the rights in 2007 and released Fallout 3 in 2008. That game moved the series into a first-person perspective and created a new audience. Many of those players discovered the original only afterward, and were often surprised at how different it was.

The opinion part: Fallout deserves credit not only for what it started, but for how confidently it did it. Very few games have such a clear sense of their own identity on day one. The original is available through digital storefronts such as GOG and Steam, and it remains, all these years later, one of the best places to see what a role-playing game can do when it commits to a tone.