Fallout Shelter (2015)
Fallout Shelter is a 2015 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks.
Vault-Tec hands you an empty underground bunker and a trickle of survivors, and the rest is up to you. Fallout Shelter turns the retro-futurist world of the Fallout games into a tidy management puzzle: dig rooms, assign dwellers to power, water, and food, pair them off, and fend off raiders and radroaches from the wasteland above. It runs on phones, plays in short bursts, and wraps its resource juggling in the series' cheerful 1950s atom-age styling. Keep the lights on, keep everyone fed, and watch a cross-section of vault life hum along behind the sealed door.
Quick answers
What is Fallout Shelter about?
Vault-Tec hands you an empty underground bunker and a trickle of survivors, and the rest is up to you. Fallout Shelter turns the retro-futurist world of the Fallout games into a tidy management puzzle: dig rooms, assign dwellers to power, water, and food, pair them off, and fend off raiders and radroaches from the wasteland above. It runs on phones, plays in short bursts, and wraps its resource juggling in the series' cheerful 1950s atom-age styling. Keep the lights on, keep everyone fed, and watch a cross-section of vault life hum along behind the sealed door.
When was Fallout Shelter released?
Fallout Shelter was released on 14 June 2015.
Who made Fallout Shelter?
Fallout Shelter was made by Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks.
Similar games
Explore Fallout Shelter guides
Fallout Shelter in our writing
A few thoughts on Fallout Shelter
Fans of running a sealed underground society should try Silo, where a buried community rations air and secrets across its many levels. The wider Fallout television series brings this game's atom-age wasteland to live-action, and The Sims offers the same addictive pleasure of steering tiny lives from above.
Vaults, undersea cities, and other worlds sealed from the surface
Fallout Shelter seals its dwellers inside a Vault-Tec bunker and asks you to keep that closed world running. Silo and the Fallout TV series share that buried-society premise, while Rapture in BioShock, Columbia in BioShock Infinite, and Aperture Science in the Portal games all trap their people inside a designed environment with its own hidden rules and a door that doesn't open easily.
Manga that imagines what's left after the world ends
Fallout Shelter dresses its wasteland in cheerful 1950s atompunk style, but the manga on this list go further into what actually happens after civilization collapses. Fist of the North Star built the modern template for nuclear wasteland survival, Appleseed and Phoenix study how societies try to rebuild, and 20th Century Boys and Bio Booster Armor Guyver both trace a hidden catastrophe back to the people who caused it.
Wastelands and ruined cities, decades after the disaster that made them
Managing a Vault means keeping people fed generations after the bombs fell, and the games and film here share that long-after-the-disaster clock. Breath of the Wild's Hyrule is still recovering a century past the Calamity, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 follow a world reshaped by an alien incursion, and Interstellar watches humanity abandon a dying Earth for whatever comes next.