Fallout | Code Like It's 198x

When Fallout came out in the autumn of 1997, the computer role-playing game was widely thought to be finished. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Jeff Green, called it “the payoff for long-suffering RPG fans who have seen the genre diluted in recent times by an endless stream of half-baked, buggy, uninspired duds”, and said the people it would appeal to were “all role-playing fans, especially those who thought the genre was dead”. Interplay’s game replaced swords and elves with a wrecked, radioactive California dressed in the look of 1950s atomic-age America, and it let one character solve its problems by talking, stealing, sneaking or shooting. Along with Diablo and Baldur’s Gate, it is one of the games credited with bringing the genre back (see Western RPG).

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Interplay, Irvine, California.
Released: October 1997, for DOS and Windows 95; a Macintosh version was advertised alongside.
Designers: Tim Cain, Chris Taylor, Chris Jones and Leonard Boyarsky, as credited in Computer Gaming World’s review. Cain was the lead programmer and producer.
Setting: southern California in 2161, 84 years after a nuclear war in 2077.
Price: $54.95.

Out of the vault

The game opens with a film. In 2077, with the world’s oil and uranium running out, a war wipes out most of civilisation in two hours. The story picks up about 80 years later, in the year 2161, with the player as a lifelong resident of Vault 13, an underground shelter housing hundreds of people. The chip that controls the vault’s water-purification system has failed, and the overseer sends you out to find another. You have 150 days before the water runs out.

That quest is timed, but the rest of the game is not. Outside the vault the player meets raiders, gangsters, a religious cult and mutants, and slowly uncovers a larger plot that Green described as “a clever, creepy amalgamation of Mad Max, Dawn of the Dead, and The X-Files”. GamePro praised its flexibility: you could find people to help build a new water chip, steal one from another vault, or ignore the quest altogether: “Just be ready for the consequences.” Green played it twice, once as a hero and once as a killer, and “it felt as if I had played two different games”.

The look was part of the appeal. The world is shown from above at an angle, and Computer Gaming World admired a design that “evokes the kitsch 1950s’ Cold War Americana”, down to a spiral-bound manual styled as a “Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide”, complete with recipes. GamePro singled out the “eerily realistic facial animations” of the characters the player talks to.

From GURPS to SPECIAL

Fallout began as a game built on GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System published by Steve Jackson Games, and early advertisements called it Fallout: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure. Well into development, as Computer Gaming World reported, “creative differences” between the two companies led Interplay to drop GURPS and write its own rules.

The replacement was SPECIAL, named after the seven statistics every character has: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. A player spends points on those, picks three “tag skills” to specialise in, such as first aid or lockpicking, and can take up to two optional traits, each with a good and a bad side. Computer Gaming World called the result “actually pretty good”. Fights are turn-based: each turn a character has a number of action points, set by the statistics, to spend on moving, shooting or reloading, and any left over add to armour class until the next turn. Choices also change how the world treats the player, through a reputation that marked Green’s character as a “champion” with good karma.

The review had complaints. The inventory was a single long list, the quest log missed quests, the characters who joined the player’s party could not be controlled directly and got in the way, and fights with rocket launchers at close range dragged on for too many turns. None of that changed the verdict.

Making it

According to Edge, the game took from 1994 to 1997, survived two near-cancellations, and its designers argued with marketing and executives over everything from the setting to the name. Brian Fargo, Interplay’s founder, finally took a build home for a weekend and told Cain: “You should call this Fallout.” Advertisements before release called it the “unofficial sequel” to Wasteland, the post-nuclear role-playing game Fargo had made in 1988.

Cain left Interplay in early 1998 while work was starting on the sequel. Interplay insisted to PC Zone that the split was amicable.

Later history

Fallout 2 followed a year later, in 1998, under Interplay’s role-playing label, Black Isle Studios. The squad-based Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel came out in 2001. Black Isle’s own third game, code-named Van Buren, was abandoned when the studio was dissolved amid Interplay’s financial troubles, and in 2004 Bethesda Softworks, the makers of Morrowind, won the right to make Fallout 3. Hyper reported that the former Black Isle team was “absolutely crushed”; fans worried the series would become “Morrowind with guns”, and Bethesda’s Todd Howard promised that Fallout 3 would keep the gallows humour of the first two games.

Bethesda bought the series outright in 2007 and released Fallout 3 in 2008. Obsidian Entertainment, which employed former Black Isle staff, made Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda in 2010. Fallout 4 followed in 2015 and the online Fallout 76 in 2018, a launch Wireframe covered for its bugs. In April 2024 Amazon began a television series set in the same world.

Sources

Jeff Green, Fallout review, Computer Gaming World issue 162, January 1998, pp. 254–255: the three-year development; the opening, 2077, the war and the 80 years; 2161; Vault 13 and the 150-day water-chip quest; the plot’s influences; two play-throughs; the 1950s look and the manual; GURPS and “creative differences”; SPECIAL, tag skills and traits; action points; karma and “champion”; the complaints and the verdict; price, designers and publisher.
Dan Elektro, Fallout review, GamePro issue 110, November 1997, p. 109: the flexibility, the ways round the quest, “Just be ready for the consequences”, the facial animations.
Computer Gaming World issue 150, January 1997, p. 227 (Interplay advertising section) and issue 149, December 1996, p. 13 (advertisement): Fallout: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure, “the unofficial sequel to Wasteland”, DOS, Windows 95 and Mac.
Edge issue 252, April 2013, p. 115, feature on Brian Fargo: development from 1994 to 1997, two near-cancellations, “You should call this Fallout”, designers Cain, Boyarsky and Taylor, the sequel a year later.
PC Zone issue 62, April 1998, p. 26: Tim Cain leaves Interplay.
Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998, p. 61: Fallout 2 advertised as a Black Isle Studios production.
Computer Gaming World issue 200, March 2001, p. 4: Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel advertisement.
Hyper issue 139, May 2005, pp. 39–41, Fallout retrospective: Van Buren and Black Isle’s dissolution; Obsidian and Troika employing former Black Isle staff; Bethesda and Fallout 3; the reaction of the Black Isle team and fans; Todd Howard’s promise.
Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, p. 30: “Bethesda gets the Fallout: It’s official: There will be a Fallout 3.”
Edge issue 217, August 2010, p. 42: Fallout: New Vegas, published by Bethesda, developed by Obsidian.
Wireframe issue 1, November 2018 (cover: Fallout 76’s beta and “spectacular” bugs) and issue 4, December 2018, p. 59: Fallout 76.
Computer Gaming World issue 182, September 1999, previews: “Remember when everyone said that RPGs are dead?”
Wikipedia, “Fallout (video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release on 10 October 1997; Bethesda’s purchase of the series in 2007; Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout 4 (2015); the television series from April 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_(video_game)