A Brief History of Fallout – A Visual Guide
November 5, 2015Herpmcderpydo strikes again with a great guide to the history of Fallout.
Congratulations, Vault Dweller!
Now YOU are equipped with the basic knowledge needed to head out on your own into the Wasteland and interact with the remnants of civilization! But before you go, keep in mind a couple things:
There was even a predecessor to Fallout 1!
In 1988 Brian Fargo directed Interplay Entertainments production and release of Wasteland. A post-apocalyptic role-playing game. In 1998, global nuclear war occurred between the United States and USSR. The Soviets believed Citadel Starstation was a military staging platform used by the United States, and when the starstation sent out a distress call and all satellites went offline, nations launched their missiles assuming the worst. A group of army engineers survived the fallout, and started calling themseves Desert Rangers. They sought to bring order to the Wasteland.
An Apple II computer.
High-end hardware needed to run the original Wasteland.
And it looked like this:
However, Interplay sold the rights to the Wasteland universe following this release, and could no longer produce a Wasteland 2. This problem gave birth to the Fallout universe!
1997
Fallout 1 was released in a retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic setting where microtechnology never took off and fossil fuels were exhausted powering the inefficient, 1950s style technologies of the world. This geopolitical situation led to the Great War of October 23, 2077, in which nuclear armed nations (Mainly the United States and China) launched their missiles and effectively ended the modern world.
Dr. Richard Moreau, looking worse for wear.
This guy fell into a vat of green goo called the Forced Evolutionary Virus and this happened. Then he got it in his head to start dipping other people into vats of green goo, so that we could all be mutants. The first Vault Dweller put a stop to that.
1998
Fallout 2 is (in)famous for jokes and references. It improves upon the first game in many ways, and introduces the remnants of the United States government, the Enclave, as they try to experiment on survivors of the Wasteland. Two other games, Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel were also released in the early 2000s, but Bethesda has declared them non-canon and they were not nearly as well-received.
Fallout 3 (The First One)!
That’s right, there was a top-down, isometric Fallout 3 in development, and the tech demo was released under the name Van Buren. This game was canceled as Interplay had to give up the rights to the franchise. The game was said to have been based around Dr. Victor Presper’s plans to cleanse the new world of the filth that had survived the Great War, and Caesar’s Legion and the Brotherhood of Steel were believed to have had a big part in the plot.
October 28, 2008
October 19, 2010
Developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda. Obsidian brought back a lot of the lore and atmosphere from Fallout 1 and 2, including some of the music. It takes place in the Mojave Wasteland and is similar in writing and atmosphere to the first two games which take place on the West Coast. Obisidian developers would have received royalty bonuses if New Vegas received a score of 85 or more, however it missed this mark by just 1 point at 84.
2014/2015
November 10, 2015
