World Design Exercise: Game #5 (Fallout 4)

Interplay Entertainment’s Fallout (Interplay Entertainment, 1997) helped pioneer and pave way for the popular Fallout franchise, notably popular for its depiction of an anachronistic setting that is historically divergent of our own, reminiscent of the Atomic Age and the Googie architectural movement, frozen in the 1950's thanks to the Great War that both started and ended in 2077.

Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) is set a couple of centuries after the Great War in the Commonwealth of Massachussets, in that sense and true to tradition set by previous Fallout titles, there is certainly a sense of grounded realism due to the depiction of twisted versions real-life settings such as the aforementioned state (mainly in the capital of Boston), as well as the Mojave Desert and the state of Washington, D.C (renamed and reshaped as the Mojave Wasteland and the Capital Wasteland, respectively). Fallout 4, like its predecessors, certainly uphold the harsh dichotomy between the cheery and endearing optimism of the 50’s and the violent reality of Cold War induced nuclear paranoia.

The introductory portion of Fallout 4 is memorable in the sense that it embodies these two juxtaposed aspects of the 50’s, as the player begins by meandering about in their overtly art-deco inspired household within an assuming blue-collared neighbourhood. The player is then able to engage in playful banter with the beloved spouse in the character creation, spend some time with their newborn son, read the morning paper and other sorts of displays of a Sunday morning domesticity. 

Fig 1. The player's house in the beginning of the game, note the furnishings and its colours which are all heavily inspired by architectural movements such as art deco and the Space Age.

Fig 2. Straight off the bat, the player's nanny bot, Codsworth, is a walking talking example of Fallout's amalgamation between the retro and the futuristic technology of science fiction.

That is until a Vault-Tec representative comes knocking on your front door and the player and their family are then forced to run for their lives as the first nuke of the Great War (the entire catalyst of the Fallout series) drops just a stone’s throw away.

One of the big questions asked in regards to the aesthetic and setting of Fallout is “Why the 50’s?” as The Inquisitr’s Tony Smejek once pointed out that despite the understandable contrast between the whimsical optimism and nuclear horror of the 50’s found within the opening sequence of Fallout 4, “There is no real justification for the game’s cultural environment of the mid-20th century era to even be frozen in this time slot.”

One could argue however that the mid-20^th century is the prime period, considering the resurgence of science fiction and the aesthetics of its futuristic technology reflected in architectural movements such as Googie, Populuxe and the Space Age in a melting pot of retrofuturistic design. More importantly however is the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, a period in time where nuclear threats were imminent and a primary source of tangible tension and unease for both nations at the time.

Fig 3 & 4. Comparison between a Fallout Shelter Handbook by Chuck West and a marketing poster for Vault-Tec's many Vaults in the Fallout series.

In Fallout 4 the player can modify and repair their Power Armour in their Googie inspired Red Rocket Truck Stop garage while Nat King Cole’s Orange Coloured Sky blares from a nearby radio in all of its lo-fi glory, or go toe-to-toe with mutant bears armed with a Space Age alien blaster pistol in a post-apocalyptic world where a nuclear holocaust signalled both the beginning and the end of a bygone era. 

It is this conscious aesthetic decision, the combination of the retro and futuristic science fiction, creating a visual bridge that had helped captivated generations of players, allowing them to immerse and feel a wave of 1950’s induced nostalgia despite realistically not growing up in such an era.


REFERENCES:

New Super Best Friends Play Fallout 4. (2015). Player's Living Room. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhhHcQliT4E.

New Super Best Friends Play Fallout 4. (2015). Codsworth. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhhHcQliT4E.

Source Unknown. (Date Unknown). Fallout Shelter Handbook by Chuck West. Retrieved from http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/infogram-particles-700/davida1366311193.jpg.

Interplay Entertainment. (1997). Vault-Tec advert and in-game town map of Vault 13. Retrieved from http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/0/05/Votf.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110116001328.