Fallout (DOS/Windows and Mac, 1997)

"A big dumb strong ox and a pretty little lady would not have the same overall experience."—Fallout design concept, quoted in Chris Smith's walkthrough, original source unknown.

Fallout is a post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game designed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay in 1997. Both companies are now sadly defunct. A sequel, Fallout 2, followed the year after, and that was (mostly) that. Fallout can be considered an unofficial sequel to Wasteland; especially in the second game, there are lots of references.

A Personal View

I have a long, if I may say so, relationship with Fallout. Along with Legal Crime and Caesar II it is among the first computer games I played, and I own five copies of the two games combined: Both in a German collection, Gold Games 4 (that's how I first encountered them), both in original boxes (with printed manuals, yay), and the first game in Interplay's 15th Year Anthology. Consequently this page is one of the oldest on this site, going back to at least February 2002, when the whole site was little more than a huge link list.

During June 2004, I noticed a significant increase in the views of this page, which became the second most popular on the whole site. This may have be due to a renewed interest in the Fallout games, or due to the fact that along with the Interplay website several other Fallout sites of long standing had vanished, or both. In any case it certainly renewed my interest in the games: I started playing Fallout 2 again, downloaded and installed the official editor and learned to use it (I never got very far).

Then Bethesda announced they had bought the license and were going to make Fallout 3, and all hell broke loose. The reaction of the fans somewhat dampened my enthusiasm, since I'm a big fan of Daggerfall too, and I didn't do much in the following 2½ years. In spring 2007, with Bethesda's game nearing completion, my interest was renewed again—for a while.

Fallout Glossary

This is a work in progress, I will add more keywords over time.

Action Points: Fallout has a turn-based combat system. Action points determine how much you can do in one term. This system was first used in the X-COM series and Jagged Alliance, both squad-based tactical games.
Perks: Special enhancements or abilities. You can choose one perk every three level-ups. Which perks you can choose depends on your stats and your level.
Radscorpions: Giant, mutated scorpions, among the first enemies you will fight in the game. A well-aimed shotgun shell can kill them, but they have the ability to poison you.
Skills: In a way, the backbone of the SPECIAL character system. There are 18 skills, six of them for combat, that you can build up. Unlike Wasteland or Daggerfall, skills do not advance by being used, you get skill points at levelup which you can distribute at will, probably a GURPS influence. The number of skillpoints you get depends solely on your Intelligence stat, thus paradoxically making it the most important stat for any type of character.
Traits: Traits do not enhance, but rather shift your character. You can choose up to two traits at character creation.

The Editor

Fallout fans had been dreaming about it for a long time, and in April 2003 (or so) the dream came true: Blackisle released the Fallout 2 map editor. Of course, Chris Avellone warns us,

Please keep in mind that this editor is not the holy grail. It was never meant to be released to the public. As a result, you may boot the editor up and realize that it doesn't match your expectations for a commercially-released RPG editor. You may suffer some retina burn. Perhaps a strange itching sensation. Constipation. So be prepared - you are about to experience a game editor, intended only for developers.

Creating or editing maps isn't all that difficult with that thing, once you have gotten used to the hex-based graphics and are able to find what you want (there are about 3000 floor tiles alone). But if you want the maps to do anything, you have to attach scripts to them, that's where it gets tricky…

Download the Fallout 2 Editor
Coljack has several tutorials. Navigation requires JavaScript.
Fallout Mods, none of them finished yet.

If you are interested in Fallout in general, it can be worthwhile downloading the editor just to explore the graphics. You will find lots of graphics from the old Fallout game that were not used in the second game, but never removed:

The Junktown entrance.
The sewers. Actually, there were far less custom graphics for the sewers than you might imagine. The walls are generic cave walls, with just some special corners (645ff) that are easy to overlook, and some scenery items that make them look like stone walls.
All the craters from the Glow,
the obelisk from Shady Sands,
all the shop signs, and the CoC signs,
all the items,
everything from the Brotherhood (most of it was used anyway),
the bomb,
the tiles from the random encounters, including the dinosaur footprint and the overturned truck,
all the backgrounds for the talking heads.

If you do not find an item or critter in the editor, that does not necessarily mean that the graphic has been removed

Since the graphics from Shady Sands were used for Vault City, they were rearranged a bit. If you load the Shady Sands maps into the editor, the buildings are rather messed up, but you could easily rebuild them. The wooden doorway (ADB0994, ADB0995, ADB1013, ADB1014) has been replaced with the Vault City-style doorway.
Gone are the vats (VATS*),
part of the cathedral (CATHGRD*, CATHIN*, TOWER*, and the tiles above the portal on the outside),
A wooden stair that was, I think, never used (STR100*),
the flickering "PRAY" screen has been reduced to a single frame, as has the Gizmo sign,
the police booth from the random encounter (TARDIS),
the sprites for the lieutenant (MALIEU*), the master (MAMSTR*), the overseer (NMOVER*/NMOVR2*) and Gizmo (NMGZMO*), the "dead Gizmo" item (GIZDEAD*) is still present,
while the sprite of a person wearing power armor without a helmet (NAPOWR*) is present, but not used for a critter.

The sprites simply were not included in the master.dat; for the scenery objects, the prototypes are still there, but the graphics have been overwritten with those "unused graphic" squares. The tiles for the cathedral were mostly replaced by the tiles for the Gecko reactor and partly with those squares.

It should be added that there are a number of small mods independent of the editor, changing not locations but details of gameplay. Jargo offers Friendly Klint (not to be confused with the older Klint the Generous, a mere cheat mod), a mod where Klint is your first NPC and will change appearance according to the armor he wears. There is a mod changing Miria into a good fighter with the ability to level up, and many more. You should find them at some of the general sites above.

Besides, there are Fallout-themed mods for other games. You will find links to some of them on the page about Post-Apocalyptic Games.

FIFE (Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine) is an open source engine that aims to be a platform for the creation of 2D RPGs. It supports the assets of the original Fallout games and probably grew out of IanOut.
IanOut is an open source Fallout engine that looks very interesting. I downloaded version 0.8.5.1 on 2004-06-27, but in playing mode, couldn't get it to run past the character creation screen, and in editing mode, it would crash whenever I tried to load an item or critter. Others seem to have the same problem too, one forum poster claimed that crashing was IanOut's ultimate purpose. The project has been abandoned in favor of FIFE.

Australia

Reading J.R. Antrim's review of Powerslide it struck me how much Australia there really is in Fallout. First, the Mad Max movies are an undenied influence (the leather jacket and the models wearing it go by the internal name of max), deathclaws, the most ferocious enemies in the game, are supposed to be mutated kangaroos, and cliffs rising abruptly out of the flat desert are more often seen in Australia than California.

So an Australian mod would certainly be interesting. Will we ever see one? I doubt it. I don't think there ever was a significant Australian fan base, and now the most active fans are located in central and eastern Europe, especially Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Still, it would be fun. Be sure to have a special encounter with Tank Girl in it.

Update 2004-09-04: As I recently read, Micro Forté, the developers of Fallout Tactics, are an Australian company.

System Requirements

Official requirements are the same for both games: A Pentium 90 and 16MB of RAM, 32MB for the DOS version of Fallout. Fallout 2 runs only under Windows 95+. You get to choose between four install versions, the smallest requiring little more than 1MB of disk space, the largest more than 600, but you can play it without the CD. Regardless of install type, savegames will take up a lot of space. If you are really pressed for disk space, use few slots only.

Recently I did a full DOS install on a Pentium 120 with 48MB RAM. Installing it took ages (something like twenty minutes, I believe, with a 52x CD drive), but it runs well on this machine, especially since I upgraded the video card. It would run even better with a faster hard drive, loading a new map or a saved game takes its time.

In general, there is no problem with fast computers. There is, however, one small, not easily recognized bug in Fallout 2: on a fast computer, movement on the world map will take less (real) time, and you will have fewer random encounters.

On the Mac

One of the fun things I added to the Mac version that wasn't in the PC version was having the Pipboy talk. I used the Mac's Text to Speech capability. When the Pipboy came up, it would say hello. It would have different greetings on various holidays. I'm not sure if many people noticed it. When the game was ported to OS X, they dropped that. I don't know why.—Tim Hume

Fallout was released parallely on the Mac. It needs Power Mac @ 75MHz and 16 MB RAM, but I don't think you will be able to buy this version anywhere any more. I think it was re-ported along with Fallout 2 for OS X, with correspondingly higher system requirements, but I'm not 100% sure. There was a savegame editor, Muta-Gen, but I could not find a working download.

Similar and Related Games

First, keep in mind that there are two Fallout games; if you liked one, be sure to try the other, too. Ideally they should be played in the right order.

Wasteland: Created by largely the same designers, this game is nearly a must-play for every true Fallout fan. If you are not familiar with games that old, the interface will take some time to get used to, though it outshines most of its contemporaries (like Ultima IV).
Shadowrun (SNES): Though created by different people and of a slightly different genre (it is not a post-apocalyptic, but a cyberpunk game), it is still something like the missing link between Wasteland and the Fallout games and, if you like either, certainly worth a try.
Circuit's Edge: This is one of those adventure games that really should have been RPGs. It shares many features that Fallout fans love, most notably the multiple dialog choices that will influence the way an NPC feels about you.
Transarctica: While not actually an RPG, it has many elements of this genre. Its setting in a new Ice Age and its retro-future aspects should make it interesting for Fallout fans.
Daggerfall: There can be little doubt that it has been an inspiration for the Fallout games, especially for its character creation and development system, which is basically a dumbed-down version of Daggerfall's. Unlike Fallout, this game is set in a more conventional "medieval fantasy" world and employs a first-person, 3D view. It is even more non-linear, and addictive, than the Fallout games. It should be added that hardcore Fallout fans consider any Elder Scrolls game the exact opposite of a Fallout game, at least that's what I learned in the Fallout 3 discussion. I still stick to my opinion.
Planescape: Torment: Unlike the earlier Baldur's Gate, the second game using the Infinity Engine is usually considered to be on par with the Fallout series in depth and quality. Personally, I didn't like it very much; I don't like the Infinity Engine, I liked neither the character I was forced to play nor the rather disgusting game world, and I thought the game had, like Betrayal at Krondor, way too much text to be any fun. But your mileage may vary.
Zero Critical: An adventure game with an intense atmosphere and detailed 3D-graphics that are quite similar to what is often posted to Fallout boards. Istvan Pely loves retro machinery that shows some wear and tear, and the SATIN base looks a lot like the vaults.
Heath: The Unchosen Path: In spite of a medieval setting and red and blue horns in the interface, Heath takes its main inspiration not from Diablo, but from Fallout. This becomes evident if you choose not to pick one of the three pre-defined (admittedly Diabloish) classes: warrior, ranger, sorcerer, but instead create your own.

Of course, you might also want to try any of the post-apocalyptic games not yet mentioned here.

Links

My own Fallout site, which specializes on the things that were meant to be but never were, but also has lots of useful downloads.
No Fanbois Allowed, a Fallout blog I started in August 2011. Over time I intend to transfer most of the info from the site above there.
The Unwashed Villagers, a Fallout player clan.
Official Fallout Site, now mirrored on NMA, some pages and images are missing.
Mike's RPG Center has a Fallout section (first game only) since 2003-09-17. In spite of the recent date this is a good old-fashioned fan page with maps, item lists, complete weapon stats, and the like.
Duck and Cover
Fallout RPGC Shrine
Fallout @ Gamebanshee is not very original, except for the walkthrough it's mainly an online version of the manual, but very useful if you want to know the requirements of a certain perk or something similar.
Team X is a Russian Fallout modding team of long standing. Last update 2003-02-24.
The Vault of the Future, dubbed The Most Unoriginal Site Ever by its author, is in English and Czech. It is about Fallout, Fallout 2 and Tactics, but the latter part is rather unfinished.
The Fallout Compendium has not been updated since 1999.
From Black Isle to Bethesda: Fallout's Story by Michael Zenke.

Walkthroughs

The Nearly Ultimate Fallout Guide by Per Jorner was written after his Fallout 2 Guide. So he takes Fallout 2 as the norm, which can be confusing, and ignores some of the differences between the two games (there are more than it seems at first glance). Still this is the most reliable walkthrough around.
Steve's Guide to Fallout has a few quest details Per Jorner omits. Steve Metzler has especially become famous for his ways of keeping Dogmeat alive all through the game. This, too, was written after the guide to Fallout 2 by the same author.

Reviews

Why yes Jimmy, Nukes can be fun! Mark Cooke titles.
The story is so well developed in this game you'll wonder why you've been playing mindless shooting games like Quake. When you start the game you'll be treated to with one of the most chilling, well-written introductions a game has ever been blessed with. Play on, and the story is subtly displayed in a mesmerizing myriad of graphics and sound.
A great RPG for adventure players to try, Ray Ivey thinks:
One of the off-putting elements of RPGs to some adventure players, well, to me at least, is that it seems they're all set in the land of dungeons, dragons, wizards, spells, gnomes, goblins, etc. I can only take so much of that particular fantasy milieu. In 1997 Interplay released Fallout, the game that kisses those tired old scenarios goodbye.
While writing this review, I am playing it for the 10th time, Steve Metzler confessed in 2003:
Fallout was the first role-playing game I ever played, and in retrospect, it spoiled me forever! Before Fallout, I had only played adventure games, imagining that RPGs wouldn't be my cup of tea due to the usually large amount of combat and lack of challenging puzzles. But I was ever so wrong. Fallout is every bit as good as an adventure game, with intriguing quests and a clever dialogue system taking the place of traditional adventure puzzles. And it also features a high degree of replayability.
Let us enter the wasteland, Drizzt suggests:
The bugs and small problem of npc's apart, this is a must-have for all Roleplayers, no matter if you like action, adventure or just a good story. Also, the number of ways you can actually play the game, the fact that it is quite big, with different ways of completing quests, and the refreshing kind of character shaping it promises for quite a bit of replayability value. And most important of all, there are no elves, orcs, or goblins.

Misc.

With a few exceptions, all these links are pages in English. There is a wide variety of Russian, Polish, and Czech pages, since I do not speak any of these languages (and would therefore be hard pressed to judge their usefulness) I have not included them here.

Culture

Here I've gathered a few links that refer to the Fallout world in general: Visions of the future from the 50s, music used in the games, general information about nukes and radiation.

The fallout shelter on This Modern World.
Cold War: Gas Mask Fashion
CONELRAD
About Fallout, a Civil Defense info-movie from 1955.
Holotapes actually existed as a prototype in 1969.
Guns and Ammo, the magazine that most likely served as a model for the Guns'n'Bullets in Fallout.

Fallout