Fallout

Fallout is a role-playing video game. The player begins by selecting one of three characters, or one with player-customized attributes. The protagonist, known as the Vault Dweller, has seven primary statistics that the player can set: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. Each statistic may range from one to ten, provided their sum does not exceed 40.

Two other statistics set during character creation are skills and traits. All 18 skills are learned abilities, their effectiveness determined by a percentage value. Their initial effectivenesses are determined by the primary statistics, but three can be tagged and given a 20% boost. Traits are character qualities with both a positive and negative effect; the player can pick up to two from a list of sixteen.

On October 23, 2077, a worldwide nuclear war between the United States and China following a global conflict caused by resource shortages devastated the world and destroyed modern civilization. The events of Fallout take place nearly a century later in 2161, and follow the Vault Dweller, a human born and raised within Vault 13, one of a number of high-tech underground fallout shelters built to protect survivors. Those on the surface live off the salvage of the old world.

Vault 13 is located beneath the mountains of Southern California. The Vault Dweller can explore major settlements including Junktown, which is mired in conflict between local sheriff Killian Darkwater (Richard Dean Anderson) and criminal Gizmo (Jim Cummings); the Hub, a bustling merchant city with job opportunities; and Necropolis, a city founded in the remains of Bakersfield by Ghouls — humans heavily mutated by radiation — who are revealed to be the former inhabitants of Vault 12. The Vault Dweller's journey also brings them into contact with various factions, including the Brotherhood of Steel, a quasi-religious military order devoted to finding and restoring pre-war technology; the Children of the Cathedral, an optimistic religious cult; and an army of virtually immortal humanoids immune to radiation called Super Mutants, led by an amalgamated creature known as "the Master".

Development on Fallout began in early 1994. Initially, Interplay gave the game little attention, and for the first six months, the programmer Tim Cain was the sole developer. Cain eventually enlisted the aid of Interplay employees during their spare time. The development team—led by Cain, the designer Christopher Taylor, and the art director Leonard Boyarsky—reached 15 people in 1995.

In 1996, the producer Feargus Urquhart recruited some Interplay workers, expanding the team to 30. Cain considered the team "amazing" for their dedication, while Urquhart described working under Interplay as "barely controlled chaos".

Fallout received critical acclaim, with critics considering it one of the best role-playing video games at the time. PC PowerPlay predicted that Fallout would revive the genre and thought that both casual gamers and fans of role-playing games would enjoy the game. GameSpot declared that because of the release of Fallout, gamers would not have to wait for a good role-playing game anymore. The Electric Playground said that they "can't think of another game that comes even close to Fallout's excellent character generation and skill system, great story, and classy delivery."

Critics praised the character system. GamePro considered it the best aspect, and Todd Vaughn of PC Gamer found the system "easy and fun to use." The Washington Post praised the "realistic tradeoffs" during customization. Computer Games Strategy Plus said the system allowed for a variety of effective character builds, and The Electric Playground and PC PowerPlay praised the game for allowing each skill to be useful. GameSpot felt that "the variety of characters that can be created and the truly different experiences that each type of character can have should satisfy even hard-core RPG players."

The 1990s saw a decline in the popularity of the role-playing video game genre as a result of stale settings and ideas, competition with other genres, and poor quality assurance. Fallout has been credited as one of several innovative role-playing games that revived the genre's popularity. In 2000, CNET Gamecenter's Mark H. Walker wrote, "The RPG genre was clearly in a slump in the mid-'90s, but ...

the renaissance began when Interplay's Fallout hit store shelves." Rowan Kaiser, writing for Engadget, called Fallout the "first modern role-playing game".