I started playing Fallout 4 earlier this summer because I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (probably best known as the co-creators of Westworld), and they’re producing a Fallout TV show for Amazon. I’d seen the video where Nolan hilariously fanboys about the franchise, so I wanted to finally check it out, and of all the Fallout games, Fallout 4 seemed the most “me.”
I’ve always loved atompunk. My parents were born in 1935 and had me later in life. I grew up with photos of them from the 1940s-60s and fell in love with the aesthetic of those years. As a lifelong fan of science fiction and dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories, I loved that era’s take on sci-fi, too, and I enjoy it when modern storytellers bring atompunk to their genre work. It’s why I love shows like Caprica and films like The Iron Giant.
Fallout 4 scratches my atompunk itch like nobody’s business, and I’m particularly obsessed with the Commonwealth’s only real radio station, Diamond City Radio. Especially the game’s original songs sung by OG Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, who does the voice of Goodneighbor’s popular songstress, Magnolia.
Over the past three months, I’ve become unhealthily obsessed with this game. Yet despite playing for an embarrassing amount of hours, I haven’t gotten to the end of the main story yet. Mostly because I keep focusing on building up my 20+ settlements, and Preston Garvey KEEPS GIVING ME TASKS. FFS dude, I’m the “General” of the Minutemen! Why am I out here running errands?! YOU build a beacon!
I recently started wondering why I’ve become so obsessed with this old game. Especially since, while I enjoy many games, I usually only obsess over games with strong narratives, like The Last of Us, or great puzzles, like Portal. What is it about this sprawling RPG that compels me?
“We’re all a little strange in here…”
Fallout 4 is annoyingly known for bugs and glitches. Sometimes that means you’ll find a two-headed Brahmin cow on top of your house. Other times, it means you’ll find the annoying woman in your settlement who blames you for a death you didn’t cause on top of your house.
The point is, you’re gonna find some weird sh*t on top of your house. Yet in spite of that, the world of Fallout is deep, nuanced, and feels real. Fallout 4 is such a well-written game, and though the NPC responses get repetitive after a while (shouldn’t they know I freaking live here? Why do settlers keep acting like they’ve never met me before?), each person you encounter feels like an actual person with a history.
I’m amazed by the thought that’s gone into even seemingly inconsequential NPCs. For the longest time I assumed that Travis, the voice of Diamond City Radio, would simply be the DJ voice accompanying the game’s soundtrack. If he’d only been that, he would’ve been an enjoyable, funny element that filled out the world.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got to Diamond City and actually got to interact with Travis. What’s more, we went on a whole side-quest adventure together that started with me helping him stand up to bullies and encouraging the woman he has a crush on to ask him out, and ended with him coming with me to save a friend of his from those same bullies, risking his life to be a hero.
Then, Travis has some beautiful character development. Whereas early-game Travis is an anxiety-ridden, clumsy, self-deprecating scaredy-cat, later-game Travis emerges on the other side of this adventure proud of himself, which comes through as he continues his radio gig. He’s saying a lot of the same stuff, but in a more suave, confident way. And that’s just one character!
Nuclear apocalypse aside, these are regular people living their lives, and the minutiae of those lives are fascinating!
That includes the player character which, depending on the gender you choose is a husband/wife and mother/father to a baby named Shaun. The main engine for the story is that you and your family were cryogenically frozen in one of the U.S.’s many Vault-Tec vaults as the world fell to nuclear annihilation. However, you woke up early—just in time to watch your spouse be killed and your baby be kidnapped before being put under again. Next time you wake, your mission is to find your child.
You get to name your character (I gave myself my wife’s last name, calling my character Teresa Douglass) and build the character through dialogue, clothing, and weapons choices, as well as access to “barbers” and “reconstructive surgeons” so you can revisit the character creation menu to change your face and hair. However, Fallout 4 also gives you a solid foundation of emotionally resonant and compelling backstory to work from.
Teresa Douglass went from feeling like a blank slate to being a fully fleshed-out person with likes, dislikes, and values who—SPOILER ALERT—is ashamed of how her son turned out after she went to all the trouble of finding him. She collects Dirty Ashtrays (I’ll regularly tell my wife, in character, “All clean ashtrays are the same, but every dirty ashtray tells a story”), and turned her faithful, charming robot butler, Codsworth, into a goddamn tank the second she gained robotics skills.
Fallout 4 has me wanting to learn more about every single person and location in it.
When life imitates art a bit too closely
The real world seems more dumpster fire-esque every day. From the rise of fascism, discrimination, and climate change, to the counterbalance of class consciousness and the labor movement spurred on by COVID lockdown and late-stage capitalism, our world looks only slightly better than Fallout 4.
I’m joking.
But am I, though?
Yet playing Fallout 4 calms me because it offers control over a fictional world that’s totally out of control. I get to build communities and alliances, find resources and protect citizens from harm, and help others find hope in the midst of horrors.
And there’s something so soothing about opening the workshop in a new settlement and spending 20 minutes scrapping all the wood, steel, or concrete you can find.
“Have faith, or pandemonium liable to walk upon the scene…”
This past weekend, a #hurriquake hit Los Angeles, where I live. Yup, L.A’s first tropical storm in over a century had an earthquake in the middle of it. Figures.
As my wife and I prepared for the storm I imagined, as I often do, what kind of person I’d be if civilization collapsed. Would I be able to repurpose items for survival? Could I successfully engage in mutual aid with others? What goods/skills do I even have to trade? And am I a good enough cook to actually live on radroaches?
Fallout 4 has affected how I interpret the world around me.
Yet weirdly, playing Fallout 4 makes me confident about who I’d be under apocalyptic circumstances. As I create a character I genuinely like, I’m creating myself. It’s nice to see yourself through the prism of a character and like what you see. I’ll never be as good as Teresa Douglass at wielding big guns, but I could be the kind of ethical leader who’s capable of bringing disparate groups together to build a better whole.
Fallout 4 feels creepily relevant as the U.S. engages in yet another socio-political “culture war” about fundamental values. A 1950s brand of morality bumping up against a world that realized long ago that the “Good Old Days” weren’t actually good, fighting not to get back to something, but to build something entirely new.
Long live the Commonwealth.
(featured image: Bethesda Game Studios)
