Welcome to our retrospective on the Fallout RPGs (sorry, Fallout Tactics!) released on PC (so long, Brotherhood of Steel). Here you'll find articles on each of the Fallout games, from the original through to Fallout: New Vegas.
“Maaaaaaaybe. You’ll think of me. When you are all alone…”
To me, that opening music has always been more fitting for the Fallout series than its better known growl of “War. War never changes.” It speaks so much more to what the games are, and their underlying horror—of being just a regular person suddenly ripped from at least a relatively comfortable home and thrown out into a brutal wasteland of murderers, rapists, drug-addicts and radioactive mutant horrors both friendly and hostile. There may be companions to meet along the way, but fundamentally you’re always the outsider—alone, a wanderer, trapped right on the razor’s edge between the old world’s mistakes and the new one’s salvation.
hat’s something that always drew me to the series, that as bleak as it is—and it can get very bleak—there’s always a chance. It’s one of only a couple of games I can think of where you can defeat the evil mastermind by persuading him that his plan just isn’t going to work, at which point he agrees to drop it. It’s also possible to make the world a better place through careful choices and acts of compassion, such as helping to form the New California Republic and turn the technology hoarding Brotherhood of Steel into something more than just armour-plated douchebags. At the same time though, Fallout isn’t afraid of saying that sometimes, shit just happens, with the most famous example being its ending. Having mastered the wasteland, retrieved the Water Chip that your safe and secure Vault needs to continue hiding from the world, and stopped an army of supermutants… your reward is to be disowned by your former life and cast back out into the sun. As the song pointedly goes, “Maybe the one who is waiting for you. Will prove untrue. Then what will you do?”
