Sometime 1998, I came across Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game in an Electronics Boutique. The box art featured armored helmet with gadgets, gizmos, pipes, and cables. After spending $40 of my own allowance, I left Electronics Boutique ready to explore this new world. I opened the box to find what was not an uncommon sight those day: a CD within a jewel case and spiral-bound manual. The day was already late. The manual would have to suffice to satisfy the curiosity that the box art had piqued.

Unfortunately for me, my own natural catastrophe was in-bound. A hurricane was headed towards our little barrier island in Florida. Living a few hundred yards away from the beach meant that we would be getting a mandatory evacuation notice. It was time to pack up and depart for Tampa. Into my bag went the Fallout jewel case and manual. Fallout, the game, would have to wait for now. Fallout, the idea, could still be explored.

A few days later, we returned to our unaffected home and settled back in. It was now time to sit down and explore this world that I had only read about in the manual. A slow installation process, some tweaking of Windows 95, and...the intro sequence played...

war. war never changes.

The world of Fallout 1 was grappling with the gifts and curses that the Pre-War society had left it. The bad luck of your home, Vault 13, having limited supplies of replacement Water Purification Chips only to find the ironic turn that a sister vault had far more on hand than they could ever need. The reason? A logistical error. The Mariposa Military Base holds an insidious secret development project that was so disturbing those who were stationed there. The Brotherhood of Steel were reclusive fanatics who hoarded technological 'relics' of the Pre-War era.

Fallout 1 explained the world in a way that you, the Vault Dweller, would have learned it. The world was on the brink of collapse. No one knew who ended society. Resources were as scarce back then as they are now. You didn't need to know more than that because it didn't matter. What happened in the past was immaterial to what you are doing today. Only the next 150 days mattered.

Fallout 2 expanded the world of yesterday, but only by so much. The Vaults, we learned, had devices to be used in order to terraform the Earth: The Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K. Conveniently powered by a cold fusion system, it was the perfect MacGuffin for your character, the Chosen One, to recover. A new faction, the Enclave was found to exist in this world. They consisted of the Old World Government that had hidden themselves away. Much like the Vault Dwellers, they were also the descendants who would get to inherit the United States as its rightful bearers. The bounties of yesterday's technology today! The monsters of yesterday's society reinvigorated!

It should be noted that Fallout 2 didn't retell the Pre-War Period in any meaningful way. The Enclave was just the result of Yesterday's Government having a contingency plan in place. The Story of the World advanced forward. A Vault had successfully established themselves as a growing city. The world Fallout 1 and 2 had established was moving forwards. The World was making Progress.

I'm not going to comment on how Fallout: Tactics ties into this. Fundamentally, the world wasn't worse off and it didn't change anything Pre-War. And I'm certainly not going to bring in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It's a waste of land, a waste of life, a waste of time.

sins of the old world

Fallout 3 was a complete surprise to me. I largely stopped reading gaming sites in the 2010s since I could tell that all anticipation for a newly announced game was completely sucked away. I had to remove the slow drip feeding of game news away because it was affecting how I would experience games.

The first person perspective gave us a new way to explore this strange world. The supermutants were really larger than life. The Capitol Mall turned into zone where two sides pushed back and forth. Radio that accompanied us where ever we went. The experience, for myself, felt richer than anything before it. Fallout 3 captured me in the same way as Fallout 1. Except, there was one thing that didn't quite sit right.

The Vaults.

Fallout 3 completely changed the purpose of the Vaults. They were no longer a place of protection from the Apocalypse. They were experiments. Experiments, as we are told, to create a perfect, peaceful society.

Fallout 3 brought neither gifts nor curses from the Pre-War period. It introduced Malevolence from the Pre-War world. Fallout 3 contains no 'control' vaults. The vaults in Fallout 1 and 2 were retroactively changed to be part of this experiment, despite Vault City existing in a normal manner. An unfortunate series of oversights was rewritten to be planned. This isn't a curse, as stated above. Each vault is now an act of Misanthropy. This is what Bethesda believes the Pre-War story should be.

I would invite the reader to apply the same framework to Fallout: New Vegas. It's ultimately about groups attempting to utilize the gifts of the Pre-War era for their own objectives. Even Mr. House himself, a Pre-War character whose motivations we do not have to guess about, made an effort to preserve Las Vegas for himself and the future Wasteland.

That is, until...

the show must go on

I'm not going to debate whether or not Fallout, the live action show, is good or bad. You can decide that for yourself. (I'm at "it's not good" to "it's bad"). What I do want to discuss about is how it has made the Pre-War era more grotesque than Bethesda's previous entries into the franchise. It does this in a way of trying to make you entertained by pointing out every reference and smiling with a Cooper Howard's shit-eating grin.

Yes I'm going to spoil the show a bit.

Season One of Fallout is a MacGuffin hunt for a chip that enables Cold Fusion. Wait, hold on, why does this matter when a cold fusion reactor exists in every G.E.C.K.? You know what, we're not here to talk plot holes. This matters because the show is all about actively rewriting history. Because it's Bethesda's Fallout, we're going to get more misanthropic.

The big reveal in Season 1 is that Vault-Tec executives suggest that they start the nuclear apocalypse themselves. By reframing the Pre-War period in this way, they've rewritten history just to make Vault-Tec the most important piece of the franchise. They've inverted the premise of Fallout 1. Fallout 1 and 2, and F:NV believed that the events of the past did not matter. Fallout 3, 4, and The Show only care about corrupting the past.

For a franchise that has always anchored itself on the phrase "War. War never changes.", it certainly did just that.

Bethesda's Fallout has become a Nostalgia Vampire. They hold up references to past games and fully recontextualize them. In Season 2 of Fallout, they've already made reference to Vault 33's Water Chips breaking. There is another scene where Barb Howard is going through rapid briefings, for us to be told "The Water Chips have a 30% failure rate, but we can test them and know which ones will fail." Vault 13's story of misfortune has now been completely rewritten as one of experimentation in Fallout 3 and, now, one of pre-determined solipsistic fate from The Show.

It doesn't stop there. In the show, Shady Sands gets wiped out by a nuclear device. The New California Republic is reduced to 2 people at a mountainside encampment. That's all the progress shown in Fallout 1 and 2 erased. They hated Fallout: New Vegas so much that they turned it into a ghost town and laid eggs of destruction in the middle of the street. These aren't interesting directions for the legacy of the series. It's all so nihilistic.

without constraints

This lengthy essay was born out of a need to express my thoughts on what felt so wrong about Fallout, the show. I couldn't put my finger on why they felt the need to hold up ever reference and force you to point in recognition of it. It all came together when I realized that it came the same place: A need to over-explain for everything in our media today. It's a fixation that has made our media worse off. You don't have to explain to your audience why every item in a scene was included. The more backstory you tell, the more the present World becomes overly constrained. Let the stories move forward and not be stuck in the past.