Fallout Fallout is 20 years old today!

[octavius]

Who would have thought Bethesda could have created such a masterpiece?

 

[Morkar Left]

Who would have thought Bethesda could have created such a masterpiece?

Especially when you consider the technical restrictions of their time!

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I will never forget that moment when I took a first step into the amazing world of Fallout. It was so captivating, so mesmerizing, so bold. The story of my missing father caught my interest right away, and then when I saw the Megaton city I was hooked for good.

 

[ColCol]

Fallout 1 was probably one of my first forays into rpgs (besides Diablo 1). I found it while going through my uncle's old pc games. It blew me away and continues to be one of my most cherished video game experiences.

 

[pomenitul]

I could have played it when it first came out but I didn't much care for sci-fi as a pre-teen. I finally made up for lost time a mere two years ago, and while I enjoyed the experience, the game sagged under the weight of its reputation (though not as much as F2 due to its greater single-mindedness). If anything, it was a lesson in nostalgia. It made me realize that, for all their 'objective' merits, my love of the IE games is inextricably tied to my having been in the right time and the right place. So yes, I did appreciate the first two Fallouts' craftsmanship, but it was and always will be too late.

 

[undecaf]

I was first acquainted with Fallout with a one paragraph preview of the demo in our local games magazine back then. I fucking wanted the game from that short description and one screenshot only. Alas there was no way for me to get it at that time and it was Fallout 2 on its release year I got to play first (a pirated CD I borrowed from a friend and still have). Fallout 1 I got my hands on around 2000.

I still play both games from time to time, and am of the sort of guy to compare all other RPG's to them in terms of quality of the overall experience. Some have gotten close, but none have been able to top them. And I believe none will, in the end.

 

[siroptimusprime]

I remember playing this for the first time on a computer my dad and I built together in... 2004? 2003-2004. Built it from spare parts that he bought for nothing from folks he'd help build computers. I was absolutely enchanted with it like I was with anything "old" at that time. Old music, films, and now getting this game installed and seeing that imposing Power Armor helmet on the main screen, the strangeness of the manual, and all these stats and skills that I barely had an understanding of... for my much younger self it was awesome. The game felt seemingly endless despite what I now know as a compact world.

I still compare that first game to everything I play. The tightness of design in quests and plotting is perfect, as much as I liked the bigger Fallout 2 with its more useful variety of skills and its own quest designs that first game is so memorable. I just finished it a few days ago doing a full combat playthrough for the first time in 10 years. I blame this game for my obsession with older games and designs.

And that ending is perfect, the Overseer has a point, and pretty ballsy. "Good job saving the world, dude! Fuck off." I'm rambling because this game is my childhood and I'm not sure if anything can top it for me.

 

[The Great Deceiver]

First thing I've installed on my brand new computer (also first). I didn't even have a desk yet as its delivery was delayed. Didn't stop me from playing it throughout the night and later trying to find excuses to miss school to get back to it as quickly as possible.

 

[ortucis]

Can't believe Bethesda has turned their Fallout IP, which they own and make millions from, into a successful next-gen shooter which is all about looking for missing family members while constructing cool weapons and bases.

Brings tears to my eyes.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I missed Fallout upon its release, but in May 1998 I bought a boxed copy and was perforating Supermutants with my .223 Pistol after Dogmeat had knocked them on the ground.

Fallout was THE game to play that summer for everyone, even people that normally don't play games like Fallout. Me and my mates were comparing notes on which weapons made the biggest mess (Combat Shotgun was a front-runner for the longest time) and taking our sweet time doing what we damn pleased.

A testimony to the game's open-endedness was that even though I picked a Good-Natured character for my first playthrough and had little to no idea what I was doing, I still managed to beat the game. During that first run I pissed off Set and the ghouls, and it was a frantic fight to the death to clear all of them out.

Fallout was therefore fresh on my mind when Fallout 2 rolled round, which made the Winter of 1998 a blast to play (Half-Life what?).

Game gets my every day.

EDIT: Strange coincidence, Lands of Lore 2: Guardians of Destiny is ALSO 20 years today, September 30th! Though it doesn't hold a candle to Fallout, it's still a notable and well-known RPG.

So happy birthday to that one as well!

 

[Baron Dupek]

What do you know, giveaway made this thing reach Top1 on Moddb today
http://www.moddb.com/mods/fallout-fixt
For one something else sit there beside Mount and Blade mods or Game of Throne mods and Brutal Doom....

20 years....

 

[Quillon]

How many times more this story will be told?

How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just... stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren't supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn't finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem...,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn't exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn't realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can't believe we're doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we'd done that we didn't want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn't do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I'm sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I've never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it's completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it's sat there for 20 years. I don't think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what's in my head. But it's up there.”

 

[wyes gull]

The Fallout 1 demo got me into cRPGs. So congratulations and thanks out to Tim Cain and the gang for setting the standard and for the 20 years of mostly wholesale disappointment that only 3 or 4 games ever lived up to it.


Damn, that was a good demo.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

 

[Citizen]

The game plays over an isometric field where enemies like bandits and stray mutts are all out to steal your lunch money and kill your face. You can see enemies on the map and can sometimes manoeuvre around them unperturbed with your party. Alert them, and you’ll find yourself embroiled in an awkwardly slow and painfully boring turn based battle dictated by a stingy allocation of action points. It’s hilarious to watch; you and your pals are running around the map like gazelles, then BANG, a scary bandit stops you and now you can only move a few inches at a time. It’s incredibly frustrating to get within a centimetre of a bandits smelly unwashed face only to find you’ve run out of action points, allowing your foe the first strike with a splintery bat upside your generic, unnamed face.

Literally everything is dictated by your action points; attacking, moving, using items, changing items, reloading items – just everything. I know that’s how a lot of turn-based games work and some people may actually like it but I just felt strangled by them and how they never allowed any wiggle room for a battle to go in a different direction. If you’re mercilessly slaughtering a bunch of enemies for example, you have to ride out the boring regulations that only allow you to kill one at a time because you have to spend tonnes of points reloading your firearms and moving from one to another. Wait a minute? Can’t I just sit in one area and shoot all the baddies from miles away? Nope. Don’t be stupid, this is the apocalypse, and your cable-tied guns aren’t worth jack. You’d be better off throwing dog♥♥♥♥♥♥at your targets as it would probably go farther and possibly do more damage if you got them in the eye.

Luckily, this antiquated Bethesda classic isn’t exactly a visual car crash, and effectively conveys an adequate, albeit unexceptional, atmosphere of post civilisation. So, at least some of these unique Fallout feels are there.

Not a muscle moved under my face when i was reading that shitty trash. Until the last paragraph.
For a few seconds i thought that it was just a generic low effort trash steam review, but the punchline fucking killed me.

 

[Saduj]

GOG did this years ago.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

The game plays over an isometric field where enemies like bandits and stray mutts are all out to steal your lunch money and kill your face. You can see enemies on the map and can sometimes manoeuvre around them unperturbed with your party. Alert them, and you’ll find yourself embroiled in an awkwardly slow and painfully boring turn based battle dictated by a stingy allocation of action points. It’s hilarious to watch; you and your pals are running around the map like gazelles, then BANG, a scary bandit stops you and now you can only move a few inches at a time. It’s incredibly frustrating to get within a centimetre of a bandits smelly unwashed face only to find you’ve run out of action points, allowing your foe the first strike with a splintery bat upside your generic, unnamed face.

Literally everything is dictated by your action points; attacking, moving, using items, changing items, reloading items – just everything. I know that’s how a lot of turn-based games work and some people may actually like it but I just felt strangled by them and how they never allowed any wiggle room for a battle to go in a different direction. If you’re mercilessly slaughtering a bunch of enemies for example, you have to ride out the boring regulations that only allow you to kill one at a time because you have to spend tonnes of points reloading your firearms and moving from one to another. Wait a minute? Can’t I just sit in one area and shoot all the baddies from miles away? Nope. Don’t be stupid, this is the apocalypse, and your cable-tied guns aren’t worth jack. You’d be better off throwing dog♥♥♥♥♥♥at your targets as it would probably go farther and possibly do more damage if you got them in the eye.

Luckily, this antiquated Bethesda classic isn’t exactly a visual car crash, and effectively conveys an adequate, albeit unexceptional, atmosphere of post civilisation. So, at least some of these unique Fallout feels are there.

Not a muscle moved under my face when i was reading that shitty trash. Until the last paragraph.
For a few seconds i thought that it was just a generic low effort trash steam review, but the punchline fucking killed me.

I am pretty sure that it is only a mock review by passerby

 

[Citizen]

Just copypasted some random text from review page, so let me present you...

The Golden Quotes:

Spoiler

1. The graphics are on par with SNES, and this turn-based system is just as stupid as DnD.
2. It makes me wonder how they ever raised enough funds to make it to a Fallout 4.
3. System is overdone and makes you not even want to get through the character creation screen.
4. The only reason I played this game was just because I wanted to say I played it.
5. I never thought that a classic game such as this would be so bad.
   
6. I went into an area from which I could not get out alive. Of course I only had one save because I couldn't ever have expected ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t like this.

The most autistic review:

Spoiler

ACHTUNG RUSSIAN TEXT

Spoiler

Серьезно? Это игра 2009 года? По графике тянет на первый Starcraft, вышедший в далеком 1998 году.
Что я могу сказать об этой игре? Только то, что это жалкий продукт рекламных акций и дешевого пиара, нелогичный, полный пустоты и скучных редких локаций, и, разумеется, нескончаемой, наискучнейшой пустыни.

Отдельно о квестах и НПС: в "огромной" локации, представляющей из себя деревню центральноафриканского типа, представлено всего 3 (3й с натяжкой) квеста: убей всех радскорпионов, принеси жало скорпиона и верни дочку здешнему мэру-шаману. Первое убежище (не помню номер) в которое нас засовывает игра оказывается настолько пустым и однотипным, насколько это вообще возможно: на все 3 этажа только 2 шкафчика с предметами.

Сразу сделаю небольшое отступление: у каждого человека в мире свое мнение, и поэтому не сильно вините меня за нижеследующие строки.

Начну издалека. Мое знакомство с серией Fallout произошло в 2010 году, когда я увидел на прилавке маленькую коробочку с золотым изданием Fallout 3. Я загорелся желанием приобрести ее и уже через пару часов был дома. Я сидел с открытым ртом и смотрел на события, которые проносятся мимо меня: рождение, десятилетие, сдача К.О.З.Ы. , и, наконец, долгожданное бегство из стального плена. И, когда мне открылся вид освещенной заходящим солнцем Столичной Пустоши, я понял – я влюбился в эту игру и не отпущу ее до самого конца.

Затем был Fallout: New Vegas. Неоновые вывески города грехов, отъявленные ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ из Легиона, полусвятоши из НКР, поселения супермутантов, а также тысячи деталей, которые заставляли этот мир крутиться, произвели на меня такой же эффект, как и третья часть. Я видел – вот оно, великолепное продолжение чудесной третьей части, с оторванными конечностями и гулями, улетающими в прекрасное далеко на бутафорских ракетах.

И тут я захотел познакомиться с классикой – первыми двумя Fallout-ми. Я слышал от многих людей, что прекраснее этой игры нет на белом свете, что она произвела революцию в мире видеоигр. Я дождался скидки на них в Стиме и с радостным сердцем купил обе. Но когда я, наконец, сел играть меня ждало жестокое разочарование.

1) Жуткая даже для 1998 года графика (как будто и не было System Shock 2 с великолепно проработанной картинкой, Half – Life или же Diablo 2) вызывала меня приступы паники, но с этим я справился. Да и не в графике дело...

2)Следующий удар пришелся со стороны игрового процесса. Суровый пикселястый герой черепашьим шагом передвигался по километрам бесплодных пустынь, что жутко раздражало (анимация бега была выполнена хуже некуда), а бои были настолько медленными и непривлекательными, что любая попытка ввязаться в драку, даже с маленькой крысой, оканчивалась 5 минутами жутких мучений и судорог.А все потому, что герой ПРОМАХИВАЛСЯ. Он безбожно промахивался в огромную крысу с расстояния в несколько метров. Вашу дивизию, да у меня половина боезапаса уходит "в молоко"!

3)Почти никакого разнообразия монстров: за час игры игры я смог встретить только ТРЕХ видов монстров (крыс, больших крыс и кротокрыс), в то время как за час игры в третью часть я успел посмотреть как минимум 8 видов врагов. Где гули, где супермутатнты, где рейдеры, где разскорпионы?..

4) Затем идут персонажи. Я, честное слово, в первый раз вижу, чтобы персонажи c таким трудом шевелили лицами. Если уж и делать лицевую анимацию, то делать ее надо очень качественно, как говориться «назвался груздем – полезай в кузов». Я понимаю, что игра 1998 года, но все же...

5) Хук справа мне прилетел со стороны интерфейса. Это ж надо умудриться сделать такой удобный интерфейс, создателя которого хочется линчевать на месте за кривые руки. Я пришел играть и получать удовольствие, а не выискивать кнопку Пип-боя или Режима ожидания.

6) Разнообразие локаций просто поражает воображение. Первое же поселение Шейди-Сендс встретило меня угрюмыми однотипными коробками домов и хромающими туда – сюда поселенцами, при взгляде на которых плакать хочется. А большой и открытый мир встречает тебя лишь песком и камнями, разве что изредка попадались жемчужины, вроде случайных разрушенных деревень или подземных убежищ. Да и там также пусто и уныло.

Но я терпел, я думал – вот сейчас начнется что – то такое, что просто втопчет вес эти недостатки в грязь и игра засияет золотом. Но нет, не было ничего! Ничего не смогло доставить мне удовольствие. Может тогда в далеком 1998 году все это и поражало воображение, но сейчас смотрится убого и неказисто. От некогда красивого и подтянутого спортсмена остался лишь крепкий, припорошенный пылью скелет из сюжета.

Мне кажется, что сейчас олдфаги бомбанут и будут поливать меня грязью и ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ом всеми доступными способами. Они будут обзывать меня малолетним ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ком и прочее и прочее, что очень удивляет меня, 25-летнего парня и в очередной раз доказывает, контингент нашего русского сообщества. Что ж пусть, это их право.

Скажу напоследок лишь одно: Fallout - игра уже очень далекого прошлого, а сейчас есть и другие способы интересно и весело провести время. И я настоятельно не рекомендую покупать эту игру, если в вас не сидит глубокое чувство ностальгии.

EDIT: Fuck you, passerby, for making me believe you. I found the original (Krai Mira) review:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197991133655/recommended/408920/

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I got into Fallout 2 first (obtained it during same week as I got Jagged Alliance 2; ended up being kinda disappointed with both because they weren't combined into one perfect game.)

When I finally played Fallout 1 it felt quite easy compared to Fallout 2 and it lacked some quality of life features that second one had.

Still .

 

[undecaf]

I am pretty sure that it is only a mock review by passerby

Are there any others in the fair 'dex?

 

[pippin]

Herve did this years ago.

 

[passerby]

Circuit
Yep, I totally stole the review, the bolded parts are all mine though

 

[Lgrayman]

I forget how I found RPGCodex but it's this site that got me started on CRPGs, I didn't think I'd like it but I tried Fallout and absolutely loved it, then went on to Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment, the latter of which being my favourite game to this day. Sadly I haven't found anything that can match these three, everything else seems to pale in comparison, even Arcanum. Only FNV and AoD have helped to scratch that itch.

 

[undecaf]

There's a cute circlejerk about this on twitter with certain developers.

 

[undecaf]

Infinitron Nothing really interesting on second glance, just Colin, Chris and Fargo congratulating eachother. Looked better at first.