Fallout (video game)

Fallout
The cover of the Windows version of Fallout. On the left is the metallic head of the Power Armor, with its shoulders taking up the bottom side, and in the background is a desolate city in front of a red sky. The Fallout logo is at the top right corner, underneath which is the logo for Interplay Productions.
Developer(s)Interplay Productions
Publisher(s)Interplay Productions[a]
Producer(s)Tim Cain
Designer(s)
Programmer(s)
Artist(s)
Writer(s)Mark O'Green
Composer(s)Mark Morgan
SeriesFallout
Platform(s)
Release
October 10, 1997
  • MS-DOS, Windows
    • NA: October 10, 1997
    • EU: 1997
    Mac OS
    Mac OS X
    • WW: 2002
Genre(s)Role-playing
Mode(s)Single-player

Fallout (also known as Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game) is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions, set in a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic world, decades after a nuclear war between the United States and China. Fallout's protagonist, the Vault Dweller, inhabits an underground nuclear shelter. The player must scour the surrounding wasteland for a computer chip that can fix the Vault's failed water supply system. They interact with other survivors, some of whom give them quests, and engage in turn-based combat.

Tim Cain began working on Fallout in 1994. It began and was conceptualized as based on the role-playing game GURPS, but after Steve Jackson Games objected to Fallout's violence, Cain and designer Christopher Taylor created a new character customization scheme, SPECIAL. Interplay initially gave the game little attention, but eventually spent $3 million and employed up to thirty people to develop it. Interplay considered Fallout the spiritual successor to its 1988 role-playing game Wasteland and drew artistic inspiration from 1950s literature and media emblematic of the Atomic Age as well as the films Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. The quests were intentionally made morally ambiguous. After three and a half years of development, Fallout was released in North America in October 1997.

Fallout received acclaim for its open-ended gameplay, character system, plot, and setting. It won "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from GameSpot and Computer Games Magazine and was nominated by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences at the Spotlight Awards. Fallout was a commercial success, selling more than half a million copies worldwide. Often listed among the greatest video games of all time, Fallout has been credited for renewing consumer interest in the role-playing video game genre. It spawned the widely successful Fallout series, the rights to which were purchased in 2007 by Bethesda Softworks.

  1. ^ Deniz, Tuncer (December 23, 2002). "A Visit to MacPlay". Inside Mac Games. Archived from the original on September 19, 2003. Retrieved July 16, 2022.


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