This is the only game I will ever personally praise: “Fallout.” And will I sing! The first one, from 1997 by Interplay, that is. Let us be very clear here: the rest of the franchise, I will say nothing about. If you love it, that’s fine. If you hate it, whatever. This is the only “Fallout” I bother repeating.
If I had the programming chips, I could recreate this game entirely from memory. Every detail of it. I am someone who often forgets words as I read them, and cannot recall the episode I last watched from a show I’ve seen many times before (we can talk about “X-Files” another time). I will not disclose how many times I have played this game for that to be true.
Don’t revolutions ring romantic? At least it does in Les Misérables. But, seriously, in politics for example, the system feels insurmountably unresponsive. Or a career. Most of everything has already been built up — the institutions, the networks — or so it can sometimes seem.
But take politics, which will not leave my mind at peace of late: What is a citizen to do but sell themself out to the lesser of evils? Go advocate for someone else’s politics? Will you ever really be able to exert your own will? You can go out on Election Day and cast a vote into a big, broken machine.
Wouldn’t it be easier to start over? Well, no. But it has its appeals. To tear it all down and begin anew — the promise of being on the cutting edge. Frustrated with the rigidity of today? Behold the context of “Fallout”: an old world destroyed and, in its place, a bold new one, fresh and full of opportunities. Nuclear holocaust might be just the thing for you.
There are the usual allures of a role-playing game, but this experience of coming into a new, primal world is what I believe “Fallout” manages to provide uniquely well (compared to later installments in the franchise). A hero’s fate guaranteed, role-playing games (RPGs) can generally provide a highly pliable world, of course, but here I believe it. It’s the greatest stress relief!
It is not quite an anarchy, which is good. I tend to believe that those who stand on the shoulders of predecessors, and ride on their accomplishments, may be better off (at least to a point) — this discussion is related to property rights. Before a social order takes hold, people can mostly do what they want. They can grab whatever land as property, and perhaps there is a better chance to be a significant figure. However, even if we are born into a preexisting machine, that machine gives us a lot: law, order, all the past inventions. Even greater heights may be possible.
Here, in Fallout, is the perfect balance of having something to start with (including sci-fi goodies), and frontier promise. The powers that be have not yet calcified into too immutable an order. The world remains largely raw and ready for the taking, while also giving you enough to enable different opportunities, and some degree of comfort.
The game may actually be helped by its age, something that may put people off initially (I assure you it is not so bad, and it is worth putting up with). The antiquated format imbues it with a sort of memory-like quality — a sense of low-def, murky mystery — so it preserves the feeling of a romantic recollection of distant history.
Maybe in this regard, the age of the game is more particularly of interest to myself, having been prone to nostalgia for times before I could barely remember, or even before I could ever know, and which maybe never were. It is also simply a very well executed project, though. I cannot stress that enough. Even if you hate the format, it is well worth it.
On the other hand, it is a fine reminder of the benefits of coming in late and working within the system. Clearly, had the developers not preordained our fate, we should not expect to be the Lenins and Trotskys of history (even if you were, it’s not like it turned out all that well for either of them).
“Fallout” isn’t a huge time commitment. It’s fairly short, actually, and it is a relaxing experience — it’s easy and enjoyable to just give a few minutes to every now and then. You can get a copy off of the Internet Archive or else it’s ten dollars on Good Old Game or Steam. As with most very old games, you don’t need a supercomputer, and it runs fine with WINE on Linux. Definitely install the Fallout Fixt mod for some quality of life things. There are a couple of other mods, too, but they are not so important.
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Andrew Tsai is a Sophomore studying political science at the University of Arizona. When politics becomes enervating, he alternates between reading voraciously or watching X-Files. He enjoys physics and philosophy as well.
