I though have always found the greatest joy was found in exploring abandoned and occupied vaults and digging deep into their mindset of ‘design for dysfunction’. In most Fallout games, you emerge from a vault into a post-apocalyptic landscape and that’s where fun is. Or perhaps given the trajectory of the United States… it was an experiment in the continuation of brutal political factionalisation. Vault 51 was a brutal experiment in stoking political factionalisation. In Vault 112, all the inhabitants were hooked up to a perpetual virtual reality experiment and psychologically tortured by the vault Overseer. In Vault 106, psychoactive drugs were pumped into the air system a mere ten days after the doors were sealed. Only those lucky enough to find themselves in a ‘control’ vault would experience something akin to the promised self-sufficient and functional society. Instead the vault network was a kind of grand social experiment designed to explore scenarios of offworld settlement. What most people didn’t realise though when they signed up for protection was that the vaults were never designed to save anyone…
Those that survived (at least in the remnants of America) did so primarily in the deep underground structures known as Vaults – enclosed, self-sustaining shelters constructed by the Vault-Tec company. It escalated to a global conflagration that obliterated the world as we knew it. For those that haven’t had the pleasure of encountering Fallout in the wild, the elevator pitch of the series is that there was a nuclear war between the USA and China. For me though, the real magic of Fallout has always been in the Vaults. It’s about striding out into a broken world and finding ways to change it for the better – or for the worse. For a lot of people, the Fallout franchise is defined by high adventure.
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