25 Years Ago, Fallout Perfected Post-Apocalyptic RPGs

Role-playing games have traditionally been set in fantasy worlds, full of undiscovered country, mysterious monsters, and hidden treasure. But a quarter-century ago, a brave team took a step into the future and created a post-apocalyptic adventure that would forever reshape the genre. Fallout, originally released on Oct. 10, 1997, has become one of the most prestigious series in role-playing history—let’s explore how it got that way.

Before The War

Newport Beach teenager Brian Fargo was captivated by computers after his parents bought him an Apple II in 1977. It wasn’t long before he was developing his own games. After graduation, he founded Interplay to create role-playing games for a variety of publishers, including the critically acclaimed series The Bard’s Tale. It wasn’t long before the company branched out into publication themselves.

In 1988, Interplay released Wasteland. Inspired by the popular Mad Max franchise, the game set players in a world generations after global thermonuclear war, exploring a radiation-ravaged American Southwest and discovering an artificial intelligence threatening to eliminate humanity’s scattered dregs.

It was an immediate critical and commercial success, a breath of fresh air into the moribund landscape. The team put a sequel together, the less successful Fountain of Dreams. But after a third title in the series was abandoned, programmer Tim Cain started to spearhead something new in-house.

Up From the Vault

In the olden days, many computer RPGs were based on the rulesets of existing tabletop systems. In the 1990s, one of the hottest pen-and-paper franchises was Steve Jackson’s GURPS—short for “Generic Universal Role-Playing System.” GURPS was a sort of catch-all product that encompassed sci-fi, fantasy, Wild West, and more in one streamlined combat system.

Cain persuaded Brian Fargo to license GURPS, and let him develop a computerized version of its ruleset. For quite some time, he was the only person on the project, building a whole new game engine to go with it. Eventually, he held an open meeting after work with free pizza to entice other team members to work on the game—which still had no premise, setting, or characters, just mechanics.

The informal group batted around a bunch of concepts—time travel, medieval fantasy, and more—before settling on a post-apocalyptic world, encouraged by Fargo telling them that he might be able to get the Wasteland license back from Electronic Arts. That process took a year with no results. What seemed like a massive setback actually proved to be the creative jolt that Cain and his team needed. They were now free from any responsibilities towards pre-existing products, and could do their own thing.

Artist Leonard Boyarsky provided the final missing piece: The new game would be set in a post-nuclear world, but the post-nuclear world of the 1950s and the Cold War. The tone was satirical and dark, contrasting the absurd optimism of the era with the absolute shambles the ruined world was found in.

On the programming side, the team was making huge advances, as well. The primitive, windowed interface of Wasteland and other Interplay RPGs seemed dated in the nascent 3D era. After experimenting with first-person viewpoints, Cain settled on an oblique, trimetric perspective that let them pack huge amounts of detail in through grubby sprites full of character. 

Geiger Counter

One of the primary design principles at play in Fallout was player choice. The development team cut its teeth with epic pen-and-paper role-playing sessions, where scenarios played out differently depending on the participants’ actions. In contrast to the strict, linear narratives of many RPGs and adventure games, the team wanted the player to wake up in this post-apocalyptic world and follow their whims wherever they would lead.

There’s a great quote from Cain in ShackNews(Opens in a new window)’ oral history of the project: “The first thing I learned was that no player ever does what you think they’re going to do.” For many designers, that would be a red flag. But the Fallout team embraced it. By building an airtight ruleset that let gamers express themselves in a number of different ways, the developers unconsciously innovated a new paradigm for adventure gaming.

Instead of leading players through encounters like beads on a chain, they built content-rich environments with numerous different things to do and let people choose how and when they did them. And, more importantly, these actions didn’t exist in a vacuum. The world adapted and responded to player choices, making them seem meaningful.

Obviously, building something this flexible and complex was a lot more complicated than the alternative. The team even had a dedicated player, Eric DeMilt, who performed absolutely ludicrous actions like maxing skills to kill immortal NPCs just to see what would happen. A time limit of 150 in-game days was instituted just to give people some impetus to play through the main plotline.

Drop the Bomb

Fallout was released in a retail package resembling a lunchbox. It was an immediate critical and commercial success, moving more than 120,000 copies in its first year. The role-playing world had been dominated by a shift towards Japanese-style games after the bombshell release of Final Fantasy VI in 1994, and many thought that traditional PC-styled role-playing adventures were nearing extinction.

What Interplay’s game did was stake out terrain that was thematically and visually distinct from what competitors had been doing. Instead of a single epic 60-hour storyline, a single playthrough Fallout could be relatively short. But starting over would let you play differently in hundreds of big and little ways, from character creation onward. 

Many industry historians consider Fallout the first “modern” computer role-playing game, and its innovations—the morality system, the perk system, the fully open world—would be copied and expanded upon relentlessly in the years that followed. The beginning of the second CRPG renaissance can be directly attributed to its impact.

Radioactive Residue

Interplay immediately began work on a sequel before the first game was even released, but the success of Fallout definitely led the company to speed up the production of Fallout 2. The team didn’t make any major changes to the game’s system, instead choosing to drastically increase the size of the game’s world and the length of the main plotline. It also did well, but Interplay was struggling for cash at the time after expanding too quickly and investing in too many projects that didn’t pan out.

It didn’t help that Cain, Boyarsky, and artist Jason Anderson, the three people most responsible for the success of the original game, bailed on the company to found their own studio, Troika. With them gone, Interplay would release Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, a tactical combat game, as well as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, a repetitive action-RPG with a heavy metal soundtrack that flopped on consoles.

Interplay would teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, and sell one of its most valuable assets, the Fallout franchise, to Bethesda in 2007. At the time, Fallout 3 was in development under the code name “Van Buren,” but the game’s new owners scrapped everything to build 2008’s Fallout 3, which moved the game into first-person polygonal 3D. Several additional offerings in the franchise followed, garnering critical and commercial success until the release of 2018’s online multiplayer Fallout 76. The next game in the main series, Fallout 5, is set to begin development after the next Elder Scrolls game is done.

Although there have been other CRPGs with the same seismic impact—the original Wizardry, for example, or Ultima IV—Fallout stands as an inflection point for the genre, firmly staking out territory that would be fruitfully mined by mutants for generations to come. Even more important, the original game still holds up. It’s easy and fun to fall back into the wasteland with your loyal dog, and discover a new character or story you missed last time around—even a quarter-century after you left the Vault.