Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game (1997)
Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a 1997 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Interplay Entertainment and Black Isle Studios.
The Vault Dweller steps outside Vault 13 for the first time, armed with a Pip-Boy and a single mission: find a replacement water chip before the vault's supply runs out. What they find is post-nuclear California in 2161, sun-bleached and fractured: raider camps, walled merchant towns, ghoul communities in the ruins of cities, and competing factions each convinced they hold the blueprint for what comes next. Turn-based tactical combat handles the violence; branching dialogue handles everything else. Every decision carries consequence, and the world tracks what you did.
Quick answers
What is Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game about?
The Vault Dweller steps outside Vault 13 for the first time, armed with a Pip-Boy and a single mission: find a replacement water chip before the vault's supply runs out. What they find is post-nuclear California in 2161, sun-bleached and fractured: raider camps, walled merchant towns, ghoul communities in the ruins of cities, and competing factions each convinced they hold the blueprint for what comes next. Turn-based tactical combat handles the violence; branching dialogue handles everything else. Every decision carries consequence, and the world tracks what you did.
When was Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game released?
Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game was released on 10 October 1997.
Who made Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game?
Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game was made by Interplay Entertainment, Black Isle Studios and Edusoft.
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Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: The Golden Age of the CRPG: 1981 to 1999
- Companion guide: Interplay: By Gamers, For Gamers, and the Golden Age of the RPG
- Companion guide: Nuclear War & Fallout
A few thoughts on Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game
Fans of Fallout's faction politics and branching dialogue tend to reach for Fallout: New Vegas, which refines the same formula in the Mojave Wasteland with more factions and sharper moral trade-offs. Mass Effect builds on a similar spine in sci-fi, where every conversation carries political weight and faction allegiances shape the outcome.
Post-nuclear wastelands where every faction wants something different
The Vault Dweller crosses a shattered California where raiders, merchants and ghouls all have their own read on what should come next, and every choice nudges the balance. Fist of the North Star is the genre's defining nuclear wasteland manga, Silo traces the same tension from inside a sealed underground shelter, The Scorch Trials sends survivors across a similar dead landscape, and Appleseed imagines what gets rebuilt after.
Dystopias run by competing ideologies, and the choices that ripple through them
Fallout tracks every decision the Vault Dweller makes as they move between raider camps and walled towns, each faction convinced its own vision is the right one. BioShock and BioShock Infinite build entire cities around a single ideology gone wrong, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 follow a world under occupation by an outside force, and The Matrix imagines a controlled reality worth tearing down.
Dark satirical sci-fi about civilization picking up the pieces
Fallout's world plays its post-nuclear despair with a streak of dark comedy, all retro optimism and cheerful propaganda sitting on top of real desperation. Redshirts turns science fiction cliche into outright satire, Thunderhead imagines a society still working out its own contradictions, Deltron 3030 scores a dystopian future war in rhyme, and Repo! The Genetic Opera pushes corporate collapse into full rock-opera excess.