You actually have to shake yourself out of your reverie and realize – it was us. The people who made these atomic cars, rusting wrecks gaping like so many lifeless corpses on crumbling roads. You start wondering about the people that built this world around you, this vast network of asphalt highways that spider their way across a ruined continent. Inon Zur’s score sounds like something off a Nine Inch Nails concept album – lonely, bizarre, lost, dangerous. While you gaze at these decaying relics of a bygone age, ambient music plays but doesn’t draw attention to itself.
Gleeful ads from a time long vanished are left to crack and fade on collapsing billboards, and the excited faces of long-dead children have peeled away with time. The water is all irradiated and most of our food is either two-hundred year old Little Debbie cakes or new mutant crops, so we might as well laugh.” But the laughter is yours to enjoy – at least if you have a twisted enough sense of humor. It’s been transformed into lunatic humor, a comic sense of resignation that seems to say “Oh well! This really is as bad as it can get. The world of Fallout is savage and dangerous, but a Walking Dead-esque sense of grimness is missing entirely. Bombed-out husks of cities are haunts for savage gangs and tribes, and mutated insects and strange creatures make their lairs deep in the wilderness, turning a trip to the next town into suicide.īut here’s the magic of Fallout – it’s not nearly as dark as it sounds. Civilization is in its infancy, struggling to be reborn. Two hundred years after the bombs fell, humanity still tries to make sense of a world changed forever by a nuclear war, still tries to adapt to new ecosystems. It’s a landscape shattered into a hundred city-states and petty fiefdoms and tribal factions, all trying to stay alive in the terrifying and hostile shadow of a vanished empire. It’s an America of childlike patriotism and ridiculous bravado.
So, like…if you imagine the Cold War escalating into general nuclear war during the Eisenhower years, then imagine a fractured America in the radiation-soaked aftermath, you’ll have the Fallout series in your head. The world of Fallout is a savage, dangerous America you’ll barely recognize – an insane version of the 1950s, a 1990s reflection on mid-century aesthetic and ideals. Later on, you’ll retroactively think to yourself, “wow, the writing is seriously top-notch.” But if you experience F:NV like I did, that won’t be your thought – you’ll be too lost in the world to think outside the fourth wall. When you describe this later on, you’ll describe Goodsprings as a place you visited, and you won’t think of it as something from a video game.Īnd here’s where you meet the people of Goodsprings. Goodsprings has become part of your memories, your awareness. Suddenly, music you would have never noticed before has become a part of this experience you’re having. If you smile, it’s from pure joy and that rare feeling of synergy – when something feels so appropriate, so perfectly placed, that the world instantly becomes so much more believable and real and right. You might smirk now, but when you’re in the game, it’s perfect. Step into the bar or general store and you’re greeted with an old dusty radio and the boxy sounds of country music from the 1950s. Out here on the frontier, people always keep one wary eye on the horizon, watching out for roving gangs. Its people eke a living out of the sun-baked desert, far from New Vegas and the watchful eye of its overlord. Goodsprings is dominated by a little bar that’s somewhere between biker roadhouse and wild west saloon. I was in a backwater caravan stop, deep in the Mojave, all alone. As I made my way down into the dusty settlement of Goodsprings, I wasn’t in my bland little apartment anymore, playing some video game. Its concerns were mine, and my concerns were steeped in the world.
From the moment I left Doc Mitchell’s clinic and stepped into the glaring Mojave sun, I was a part of this living, breathing world.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been swept away like Fallout: New Vegas swept me away. Seriously, ten years later and this is still one of the best teaser trailers I’ve ever seen.