What it's like playing Fallout 1 for the first time in 2025

I recently played Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, 28 years after its original release. If you've ever considered checking it out but never pulled the trigger, I'd recommend you do so.

I'd like to share my experiences with it but first off, some background on my time with the franchise thus far. Like a lot of millennials, my introduction to the Fallout series was through the lens of Bethesda. As a trigger-happy college student I wandered around Fallout 3, and had a pretty good time with it. I don't remember being very engaged with the plot, but as a sandbox of random quests to do it was largely successful.

I tried Obsidian's New Vegas but wound up eventually writing it off as a dustier, buggier expansion to the previous title, transposed to a new location (more on that in a minute). It was Fallout 4 that first marked a turning point in my opinion of the series. It was still fun to run around the wasteland, but the skill system was drastically simplified, dialogue was cut down to Mass Effect style vibe checks, and I could feel the developer's preference for shooting, looting, and settlement crafting taking the spotlight from the role playing mechanics. This isn't a treatise on Bethesda's Fallout games, but for the sake of perspective I want to paint a picture of the paradoxical opinion that this game, along with Skyrim, gave me on the Bethesda game design template:

The engine is buggy, the quest design is repetitive, the combat mechanics are mostly functional but shallow, the character building systems are pretty easy to abuse in your favor, the world-building is pretty good (when it isn't just stolen from older fallout games) but the writing itself ranges from "childishly simple" to "decent", the characters are mostly two-dimensional if not one, your player character is an empty-headed shell that winds up as the Coolest Person in the Universe regardless of what you do, and your actions as a player have very little impact on plot or the world around you beyond the rigid structure of the primary questline's pre-written story. But also, I've played dozens of hours and had a great time. Terrible games, 8/10.

Fast forward a few years and I got wind of how fashionable it's become to look back on New Vegas with rosier glasses than at the time of release. It's surely always had its fans, but in the last couple of years the buzz around the game online has gotten louder to the point where it drowns out many of its contemporary criticisms. It's now widely heralded as One of The Good Ones among those who were around for Fallouts 1 and 2, and the fact that Fallout 4 planted its flag so firmly in the "we're an action game, not a numbers game for dorks" camp probably provided a lot of fuel for that fire. So, eager to redeem what my younger self had dismissed, I revisited New Vegas and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the game that I had missed the first time around. Suddenly the most interesting parts of the game for me were the characters and story, and not the mindless wandering for caps and murder. The world posed interesting questions, the decisions had lasting consequences for a wide variety of in-world peoples, and I actually wanted to put points into Speech just to see what I could learn and how the game would let me solve problems with it. I'm not ready to say that it's the pinnacle of interactive story telling but it's a really good game. And I'm pretty sure a big part of the reason I feel differently now, peer pressure aside, is the decade or so of time that passed. I was barely an adult when I played Fallout 3, but now that I've (arguably, somewhat) matured I find that I sometimes want more maturity from my games as well.

But this isn't a treatise on New Vegas either, so before I forget what the title of this article is, let's get on with it. With renewed interest in the series, I decided it was finally time to check out the series' much-lauded roots and dove into my time machine, back to the distant land of 1997.

fair and unnecessary warning: spoilers ahead for a game that's nearly as old as I am

Fallout 1, or How I Learned to Start Worrying About Bombs

Imagine, if you will, that you're completely oblivious to this thing called "Fallout". The very first scene you're treated to upon booting up the game is a wartime propaganda film, featuring an American in hulking power armor as he executes a cowering man in the street in "Newly Annexed Canada". The American and his buddy laugh, and then you're asked to buy war bonds. The intro narration explains that this situation is part of a struggle for nuclear resources that has torn the world's nations apart and resulted in all-out atomic war. Meanwhile, a small percentage of people, yourself included, have survived for roughly "a generation" or so in underground bomb-proof vaults while the planet above turned to ash and awful. Even the paradise of being alive has its troubles however, because your technology for generating clean drinking water is on the fritz, and your character is tasked with venturing out into the nuke-blasted wasteland, with only has a couple of months to to find a replacement macguffin.

This time limit is real, by the way. A modern game might give you the the illusion of a time limit because the writer once learned that tension drives plot, but in reality letting you frolic around collecting things and exploring until you deign to pay attention to the main objective. Fail to find a water chip quickly enough in Fallout and whoops, all your friends and family die of thirst, Game Over. So you step out of safety for the first time into a rat-infested cave, and the first thing you see is a human skeleton on the ground, right in front of the door, wearing the same bright blue Vault 13 jumpsuit as you. It's at about this point that two things become evident in your situation:

1. This game has some not-very-nice things to say about armed conflict and the societal forces that drive it.
2. The world in which find yourself as a result of the aforementioned armed conflict seriously sucks ass.

Once you get a grip on the the archaic interface well enough to kill some rats and leave the cave (more on the game's age later), you're deposited into the California desert with naught but a handful of bullets and a flimsy suggestion to go check out a neighboring vault to see if they've got any priceless life-saving technology to spare. That lead, naturally, winds up being a dead end with no follow-up clues. Killing rats in a cave is the closest thing that this game has for a tutorial, and once it's over the game isn't terribly interested in holding your hand.

The currency of the world outside the vault is bottle caps, you don't get any to start with. What meager amounts you can scrape together in the early game won't buy you a whole lot either unless you went all-in on the Barter skill. You're given little direction once that first leads turns up diddly and, since the game has no level scaling, any direction you wander might put you in a friendly town or in a random encounter with several rocket launcher wielding super mutants who live just down the block from Vault 13. Some locals are more helpful than others. The guy you meet at the gates of Shady Sands will happily show you where to kill some radscorpions for a few caps, but when you meet the Brotherhood of Steel they slam the door in your face until you piss off to a radioactive crater full of corpses on a barely disguised prank quest.

I built my first character as an all brains, no brawn smarty pants, which felt like an interesting choice at the time. This allowed me to gain some crucial information during a deep and well-written dialogue with a supercomputer, and my ability to repair machines came in handy at some key story junctures. The downside was that my Strength was too low to wield any weapons other than the starting pea shooter pistol, so combat became a rough ride, real fast, even with most of my points in the Small Guns skill. When I eventually got access to power armor, all the Intelligence in the world wouldn't allow me to use it. In order equip armor you first have to put it in your inventory, and my carrying capacity was so low that even with an empty backpack I was too weak to pick it up. The cruel joke here is that power armor raises your strength by 3 whole points out of 10 and it just taunted me, sitting on the floor in a heap. It was at this point that I abandoned my noodle-armed protagonist and restarted the game as a big dumb brute with the quads of an ox who specialized in bludgeoning problems out of his way with melee weapons.

You might be thinking at this point that this all sounds frustrating and like a bit of a drag. Believe me, there were times when I felt the same way. But here's the thing, dear reader. Like the video game equivalent of type 2 fun, these troubles live in my memory not as a miserable slog, but as an interesting and challenging series of obstacles. This game does not hand you a suit of power and a minigun as part of the opening questline (Fallout 4 👀). Its factions do not recognize your main character energy and give you a key position as soon as you walk in the door (Skyrim 👀). Fallout 1 isn't here to give out participation trophies, Fallout 1 does not care about you, and I love it for that, precisely because of how rare a trait that is in today's increasingly mainstream-targeted gaming landscape. While a game like this might have been the expected experience in 1997 when PC gaming was the domain of niche-interest nerds, it's become something unique and therefore valuable, and worth seeking out. Hey, speaking of 1997, we should probably take a sidebar to address the wrinkly elephant in the room.

Please Fallout, I Beg You, Just Let Me Use The Scroll Wheel In My Inventory

If you're accustomed to playing games from the last 10-15 years or so, Fallout is gonna be a bit of a rough start. I'm not repeating myself from the above section. I mean that in a literal, technical sense. Thankfully, the GOG version of the game ran perfectly on my Windows 10 box, but I've played enough old games to know that this isn't always the case. If you're lucky like me, or just tenacious, you'll still have a learning curve as soon as you leave the character creation menu. I haven't played other CRPGs from this era, but I suspect that this is the kind of game that just expected you to read the manual to know how to play it, because the interface felt alien and a little bizarre. Clicking to move is fine and dandy, but right clicking to toggle between various left click functions, swapping between ill-defined weapon modes (one of which is how you reload guns, by the way), and how exactly to use your various skills outside of combat took some trial and error and a few internet searches to really get comfortable with. I couldn't find weapon damage stats listed in game, and couldn't figure out at a glance what the various armor stats meant. Keep the wiki handy. If you're used to enemy health bars, you'd better adjust to the tabletop RPG style where the GM just shrugs their shoulders and says "Eh, it looks pretty hurt" because that's all you're getting in the combat log without a certain character perk.

Outside of the interface, the game itself has some pain points that will sting the modern gamer. Compared to today's standards your objectives can be poorly signposted, in a way that straddles the line between "a nice challenge to figure out" and "what the hell do you want me to do". I was told to go find some missing caravans very early on, but only ever had that quest marked completed on the way to wrapping up the main story, without ever getting a clear answer on what happened to them. A look through the wiki post-game told me that I had missed the solution, but it turns out I'm lucky there even was a solution. I discovered that a number of things in the game were cut for time during development but still have lingering threads in the finished product. I uncovered a conspiracy that the guy running the Iguana-on-a-stick food stand was actually selling human meat, but the ability to report him to the authorities was never implemented, so now I guess I'm taking that secret to my grave. Sorry, residents of The Hub. Also sorry to you if you grow attached to the Followers of the Apocalypse, because in order to get their good ending where they don't all die in the epilogue you have to complete a side quest that doesn't actually exist!

I realize that some of these complains are nitpicks and others could probably be fixed with community mods, but these things do matter to a game's approachability, and its worth discussing how the ravages of time can prevent it from being discovered by more people. Video games are a unique form of media in that, compared to things like novels or films, the way you interface with them is a core part of the experience. Whereas a blu-ray of a movie from the 1960's is still essentially the same film that people saw in theaters, the platform and interface of a game represents a more tangible barrier for newer audiences to explore past media. This isn't just about adjustment to different UI and graphics standards, but also literal access to the game, as porting to modern platforms gets harder it eventually stops being fiscally responsible to do so, even while older platforms become scarce. How many more versions of Windows is this game going to run on?

I may have given the impression earlier that that this is some sort of hipstery "games were better in the old days" rant, but that's not my intention. I simply want to highlight that while there's plenty to love about gaming in the 2020s, good art shouldn't be ephemeral. It shouldn't become disposable after a decade and a console generation. There's a lot to love here too.

Enough Digressing, Let's Talk Plot

With some built-up knowledge of how to conquer the early game under my belt, my second character fared much better than my first. Once you succeed in finding a water chip for your vault, the overseer turns you right back around and sends you out to deal with the looming threat of super mutants that have been running rampant in the area. Turns out they're an unexpected result of a pre-war military program called the FEV, Forced Evolutionary Virus, initially developed to fight disease. A hapless human soldier runs afoul of the FEV, and his body is twisted and deformed until he becomes the main villain of the game, simply calling himself the Master. The Master isn't human anymore, he's a mass of organic matter merged with technology, set on injecting all the life he can get his mitts on with FEV and rolling it up into his mass hivemind consciousness. He figures if he absorb a critical mass of humanity, the world will enter a new era of peace. If everyone's the same, then there won't be any differences to fight over, right?

A surface-level fine idea of paper, but in the meantime that means a whole lot of invading and killing of actual human settlements. Also, any given persons willingness to be a part of this little club isn't really part of the Master's equation. You get with his version of the future, or you get a super boot to the face. Remember those missing caravans I alluded to a couple of times? Captured and turned into super mutants. Here we are, barely a generation after lust for power and control have brought nuclear hellfire to the world, and the villain of this game is a person who wants to force his fellow survivors to submit to his unquestionable stewardship, to join or die, to achieve peace through the iron fist of the super mutant and create a world where a single superior race is the only race left. Remember when I said that this game had some not very nice things to say about armed conflict? War Never Changes, indeed.

How exactly you deal with the Master is fairly open-ended. You could march in, guns blazing, and blow him to hell if that's your style. You could march in, mustache twirling, and join his cause if you're feeling an evil playthrough. If you have enough Intelligence and collect the right intel, you can find out that super mutants are sterile as a side effect of the FEV, rending the whole plan doomed to fail. You can convince the Master of this and he'll just...give up. He'll let you leave while he off himself in shame, no fighting needed. If none of those options seem appealing or you don't have the skills for them, you can also do what I did and ignore him entirely. There's an live nuke hanging out underneath his base of operations, and if you fight/talk your way in you can rig it to blow and scurry out without ever talking to the Master at all. Problem solved. One mark of a good RPG is its willingness to let you miss out on content based on your choices, and Fallout allows for an impressive array of approaches to the endgame for a game of its time.

The Vault 13 Overseer is an Asshole

After you wrap up the plot, you're treated to one of my new favorite video game features: an extensive epilogue. New Vegas did this too, and I wish every RPG spent 10 minutes showing you the consequences of each and every one of your actions so you're forced to confront them. Every city, faction, and major NPC gets a little blurb explaining their post-game fate and it's immensely satisfying to have it all laid out in simple terms where you succeeded, where you failed, and how the world is different for having you in it. I want the ghost of Ron Perlman to show up at my deathbed and judge my life like he's reading from Santa's list.

At the very end, the only thing left is to wrap up your character. Assuming you didn't go on a killing spree in you own neighborhood for some reason, Vault 13 welcomes you back with open arms and thanks you for saving the world. Then the overseer tells you to leave and never come back. No, seriously. He fears that tales of your adventures will inspire too many other people to leave the vault, destabilizing the small community and draining it of talent. "You saved us, but you'll kills us. I'm sorry. You're a hero, and you have to leave". And that's it. The game ends with a cutscene of your character wandering back out into the desert, head hung low. Then End. Remember when I said the world sucks?

Fallout is game that feels constrained by the technologies of its time. It's a small, slightly buggy world packed with more ideas than it can comfortably fit. I didn't even mention the barely characterized companions or the ruined city you can enter that has absolutely nothing in it. It's got great bones though, and I'd say that a team with a higher budget could flesh this game out a little better, but that strays dangerously close to advocating for a remake and I'd much rather we spend our time on new ideas instead of always treading circles around the old ones. I enjoyed my time with Fallout 1, and if you read to the end of this article then I think you might too. It's cheap to buy and doesn't require great hardware to run. Just please, please give yourself a Strength score higher than 3.