Fallout is one of the best, and, I contend, one of the most misunderstood computer role-playing games ever. It received critical acclaim for its open-ended nature. Using the game's "S.P.E.C.I.A.L." character-creation system (an acronym that stands for the character attributes of strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck), you could produce a great variety of different characters, like an eagle-eyed sniper, a heavy weapons specialist, a charismatic diplomat, a nimble knife fighter, an experienced wilderness scout, and others. It also let you travel just about anywhere across a fictitious and highly irradiated version of the United States. This included areas designated for low-level starter characters to the very final areas of the game. However, Fallout was also a highly compact game and actually had an end in sight. You had plenty of time to meet interesting characters and could solve frontier disputes in your adventures. However, most of your time was spent adventuring--not wasting dozens of hours fighting wave after pointless wave of the same monsters or walking mile after pointless mile. When you were finished (because finishing the game before getting bored of it was actually feasible), you'd want to play through it again as a different sort of character. When Black Isle was officially created in 1998, as a result of the development of the sequel Fallout 2, this vision seemed lost. Fallout 2 did preserve many of the features of the original Fallout, but it was also a long-winded, sprawling game that was, in many ways, more linear than the original game​