Playing the original Fallout a quarter of a century on from its original release feels like dusting off a rich tome charting the key events in gaming history, and turning it to the RPG chapter. There is such a density of knowledge here about what a videogame RPG is that it’s something of a Ground Zero for the genre in gaming today. Incredibly, once you get past the initial obscurity of distinctly 90s PC UI (though I secretly love that busy, screen-hogging UI designed to resemble a creaky old Pip-Boy) , much of it still impresses and resonates today.
The years haven’t been completely kind to Fallout – some elements of it certainly feel a bit battered and rusted by the irradiated sands of time – but in other ways it presents a world with the kind of dynamism that modern games still strive for. I can only imagine how jaw-dropping it must have been back in 1997 to explore a game world so reactive that you could trigger a war over a town and change its incumbent power, or be such a smooth-talker that instead of fighting the final boss you could persuade him to kill himself, or disguise yourself as a cultist to infiltrate their church.
Piss someone off and they might shun you for the rest of the game, kill a key NPC and, well, that NPC is dead. Kill every NPC in the whole game if you like (you wouldn’t be the first). It offers the kind of dizzying freedom that modern games would shirk away from due to ‘sensible design’ and making sure the player doesn’t waste their time playing in a failstate, There’s something so incredibly raw about Fallout’s approach to player agency. It’s the essence of RPG freedom – warts and all.
The story and interfactional politics are relatively simple here, almost quaint compared to the vast mythos the series eventually expands into. Having spent your entire life in Vault 13, sheltered from the irradiated American wasteland up above, you’re sent on a mission into the New California overworld by the vault’s Overseer to retrieve a water chip so that the vault doesn’t run out of clean water.
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As you explore the overworld, you hear murmurs of people disappearing around a military facility, of Super Mutants running rampant, and eventually stumble upon a nefarious conspiracy that you can try to unravel (or join) in a pleasingly diverse number of ways. You can have dealings with the Khan Raider gang, the Brotherhood of Steel, some shady crime syndicate in the Hub area, as well as a few factions vying for power in the LA Boneyard. There may not be a ton of factions, but each is brimming with character, and there’s a cool kind of Mad Max dieselpunk quality to the whole setup that fades in later games.
The amount of choice in character creation, and the freedom in how you tackle missions, is pretty much the same as that which carries through to later games in the series, which is testament to just how great the quest design was here.
One of the first side-missions I undertook was an assassination job for Decker, a powerful crime boss who (somewhat surprisingly) never reappears in the series. My targets were a couple of merchants whose only transgression was refusing to deal with Decker. The process of sneaking past armed guards at night, then gunning down the unarmed couple in cold blood is disturbingly well expressed through the game’s sparing art style; the written pleas before the shooting, the falling animation during, then the puddles of blood after are remarkably effective, and the 25-year-old graphics engine did nothing to detach me from my horrific acts. If anything, it’s just rudimentary enough that your mind fills in the blanks.
I later found out that instead of working for Decker I could’ve killed him instead, or simply taken the upfront portion of the money for the hit then scarpered. Another particularly grim and memorable quest was joining the Khans raider faction, which entailed killing all their female slaves simply because their leader was bored of them. Doing so would unlock freedom of movement around the Khans’ base. Alternatively, instead of killing the slaves you could try freeing them by fighting your way through the Khans, sneaking past them, or even intimidating their leader Garl into handing them over to you. This would unlock Tandi (a major character in the sequel) as a party companion. In another compelling quest, you could supply an upstart faction with weapons so they could invade a settlement, kill the authoritarian faction in control there, and take it over.
People were, ahem, blown away by that Fallout 3 quest where you could destroy the city of Megaton, but the precedent for these kinds of world-altering decisions was already set in Fallout 1. It was – and remains – really quite special: a commitment to RPG freedom of the sort that the medium seemed to drift away since then, and only sometimes returns to explore (not by coincidence, mainly through games made by Obsidian – a studio made up largely of Interplay and Black Isle alumni).
Like its direct sequel, the original Fallout has a darker tone than the later Bethesda-made games. Where in Fallout 3 and later your Pip Boy blares out crackly country, rockabilly and other old-school Americana music, in Fallout 1 your adventures are accompanied by deep drones and eerie mood pieces, which feel apt for its muted and murky colour palette. To some extent the dirty aesthetic and compressed heavy ambience are due to technical constraints, but it’s a classic case of limitations bringing out the best of a talented development team. From the surprisingly populous urban environments like the Hub and LA Boneyard to the haunted shells of abandoned vaults, the first wasteland of the Fallout series is still an intensely atmospheric place.
Playing Fallout today, the toughest hurdle to overcome is the pacing. At the same time as not being terribly long for an RPG (which I’m fully in support of), it can still turn into a bit of a slog in the latter stages unless you distribute your skill points quite specifically. Levelling yourself up in a fairly free-flowing and unoptimised way, you can complete most of the key quests and side-quests in the game, yet still find yourself severely underpowered for the army of Super Mutants you take on in the final act.
In fairness, even that climactic final chapter maintains the game’s dedication to choice. Instead of fighting your way through the mutants, you can sneak and computer-hack your way past, but your proficiency in these areas needs to be exceptional. Unfortunately, that means you may find yourself scouring the world for increasingly scarce quests, or just grinding on random overworld map encounters and cookie-cutter caravan escort missions until you improve the requisite skills to complete the game.
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But let’s give it a break. This game is 25 years old, and can still teach the young bucks of today a thing or two about player agency in a game world that doesn’t feel like it revolves around you – if anything, it feels refreshingly uncaring. Get past the initial UI stodge, and Fallout still plays wonderfully. It’s amazing how you can see the multi-pronged quest design and world-building carry all the way from here through to Fallout 4 (though its DNA is most tangible in Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas, which had some of the original Fallout team work on it).
The strength of Fallout’s writing and RPG rules still shines today. Everything right down to its ancient graphical style serves a ravaged world that feels – much like the game itself – both of the past and the future. In other words, timeless.
